-----Original Message-----
From: Beth Livingston [mailto:
bethlivi@ufl.edu]
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 9:47 AM
To: Janet Romaine
Subject: Your question about email surveys
Janet:
I am a PhD student at the University of Florida, and I use SurveyMonkey
for all of my research (as do most of my colleagues here at Florida)
and we think its great. They have a professional subscription for $30 a
month that includes encryption for privacy's sake and 1000 responses a
month. You can have as many surveys on there as you want. Also, it
exports your collected data directly to excel so you can convert it to
any analysis program you usually use. It isn't entirely flexible
(complex questions are sometimes difficult), but you can ask any number
of Likert-type questions, fill in the blank, etc. You can even add
logic if someone wants to skip a page if it doesn't apply to them.
We've had a lot of success with it, but as another responder mentioned,
people tend to not respond if a) they don't know you, or b) they think
you want money. So sometimes contacting a group member personally and
having them forward the email survey link works well. Then they tend to
participate more often.
There are a couple of resources I looked at when I was learning about
e-surveys, and I am attaching one of them. It's a good summary of the
documented pros and cons. An article in the International Journal of
Research and Method in Education by Glover and Bush (2005) is also
good, but I do not have a pdf copy of it. All in all, my advisors and
professors at UF haven't run into much resistance from reviewers as
long as the methodology is described well. I think many people are
moving in this direction. PS: If you decide to use surveymonkey, send
me an email backchannel and I will send you a link to one of Dr. Judge
and my surveys to show you how it works--
Hope this helps... :-)