• Together we create the survey, and I prepare it for online administration.
• You identify one or more trustworthy people who can administer the online survey over the telephone. These people need have only basic computer skills and Internet access. They do not need two telephone lines.
• I train these people (under 1 hour usually) to orally administer the survey over the phone while entering the responses into the online survey. The training is basically how to ask questions and record responses verbatim and without bias.
• If you have a list of email addresses and phone numbers:
• Typically, you would send emails with the link to the survey page (and a password if you want access to be protected) to potential respondents.
• Respondents could complete the survey themselves online. The email would add that if they would rather be interviewed over the phone, either reply to the email or just wait.
• After a period of time (depending on your timeline), the telephone interviewing would begin.
• The database would have a variable called 'online or phone' to compare if there are differences in responses.

• If you do not have email addresses or telephone numbers:
  • My longest-term client uses a company which provides random telephone numbers per your specifications. I have no relationship with this company. He has used them for years, and I can refer you to them.
  • After you receive your telephone number list, telephone interviewing would begin, with interviewers entering responses into the online form.

These are the advantages of using the online survey method (including telephone interviewers entering responses into the online form):

• There is no separate step of data entry. Respondents and interviewers enter their own data. This can be a significant cost savings, and it eliminates second-party data entry errors.
• All responses are automatically written to a tab delimited database. I take the file to my statistical software, and I can convert the database to Excel if you want a copy as well.
• Complete responses to open-ended questions can be pasted into a Word file for content analysis and inclusion as an appendix in your report. Reading verbatim responses can add quite a lot of depth of understanding. My software allows me to paste the entire set on an open-ended question into a Word file in one operation.
• I can conduct content-analyses on the open-ended questions and provide a summary of responses.

User-friendly is of paramount importance to me. For example, I program my surveys so that the user can simply adjust the font size to his or her liking. Something as basic as this has been lost in many of today's fancy-looking online surveys.

I program with basic HTML. I do not know Java programming. I see surveys as a means to an end and not a marketing tool itself. However, if you have a preferred background and header company logo, I can use it.

With the programming I use, one feature is not available, but I have a work-around. I don't do the 'automatic selection' or 'forced skip patterns.' The work-around is that I force this skip pattern while processing the file. I only select responses from the respondents who are supposed to answer that question (who match the skip pattern). For example, if Question 7 asks you to choose Yes or No, and people who answer Yes go to Question 8, while the No people go to Question 9, all respondents will be able to answer both, but results will reflect the skip pattern.

• Here are two examples of on-line surveys:

A recent in-depth parent survey for a private school. Note the variety of question formats and the inter-related questions which serve as a "soft" validity check. For those not familiar with online surveys, a "primer" that shows the four basic question types for online surveys and the use of images and color.

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All content Copyright, 2010 by Christopher M. Glenn, Ph.D.