an Creating Online Survey
GK-12 Science Fair Support February 3, 2005
So youve decided to do a human survey for your science fair project. Great idea! But now the hard part is ahead of you. You have to create many pages of surveys, hand them out, collect them, analyze the data AND gure out how to present it. Thats a lot of work, right? WRONG!! Below youll nd instructions on how you can create and administer your survey online. It is easy, convenient for you and your survey respondents, and also gives you the power of a computer to help you analyze and present your results. So read on, and in a few minutes youll have your personal survey ready to go! What youll need to do this project: Before beginning this project you should already have decided on your topic of investigation for your survey. You should already have designed the questions you will ask on the survey and tested them on a small set of respondents to make sure they are clear and give you useful data. In order to do this project you will need a connection to the Internet, a working email address, and a web browser. If you do not have an email address, you can get one for free at http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.hotmail.com.
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Step 1: Choose Your Survey Service Provider
In this document well walk you through the steps of setting up a survey using the free service provided by http://www.votations.com. However, there are many online services that provide free or relatively inexpensive survey support. You may wish to explore several of them and choose the one that best suits your needs. They are all relatively easy to use and have extensive instructions. We suggest the votations.com free survey option. If you choose this option, open your web browser and navigate to:
http://www.votations.com/services/surveyserv.asp 1
On this page you can review the features of this service provider to see if they will meet your requirements. If you are not sure, there is no harm in continuing the process. You can stop at any time. Other alternatives are:
http://www.createsurvey.com/ http://www.opinionpower.com/startSurvey.html
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Step 2: Create Your Account
Next you need to create an account for yourself. Go to the following link and ll out the form there:
http://www.votations.com/asp/members/newaccount.asp
We suggest selecting the FREE option for your survey. In addition, you may want to opt out of the news and updates.
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Step 3: Begin setting up your survey
On the next screen youll see a message telling you that no surveys are available. This only means that you have not yet created a survey. Click on the link to create a new survey. You will be taken to a survey set up page. The rst section asks you for website information. The service assumes that you have a separate website where youll be linking your survey, but it isnt actually necessary. Type a title for your survey in the Website Name box (which can be the same as the title in the next section) and leave the Website URL box as is (just containing http://). The next section asks you to title your survey. This title will be visible to respondents, so choose something informative and professional. In this section you will also choose how many questions will be displayed per page. In the free accounts there is no option to turn o the check that each respondent is unique. In certain ways this is an advantage because it prevents fraudulent double voting. However, it will prevent you from having many people enter their answers from the same computer. If many of your respondents must use the same computer to complete their surveys, I suggest selecting another service provider. The next section asks whether you would like to collect your respondents email addresses. In 2
general, people do not like to give their email addresses except when necessary. Thus, for the convenience and privacy of your respondents I suggest leaving the box unchecked on this option. In the nal you section can choose your survey builder mode. The default is Quick Mode. Change this to the other option: Full Mode. Finally, hit the go to step 2 button.
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Step 4: Enter Your Questions
The next screen youll see is a little bit cryptic. It should show a place to select a design a theme and a button that says Insert. Click the Insert button to begin adding in your questions. This will take you to a page where you can add in a question. Type in the question text and select the format you want for the answers. Once you have entered the question and answer format, press the button that says add question & enter answers. This will take you to a screen where you can add in the available answers for your question. Add the answers and then press the Add the new question button. You will be brought back to the main screen of your survey. At this point you can see the design of your survey and try the dierent design options to get one that you like. Hit the insert button to add another question and repeat the process described above for entering a new question. Keep going until you have entered all of your questions. The limit for a free account is 15 questions.
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Step 5: Save Your Survey and Record a Link
When you are done entering questions (or any time along the wayit may be a good idea to save early in the process), click the save your survey link. This will take you to a new screen with various HTML code options. These are all of the dierent ways to include your survey on a website. Were going to distribute the survey by email, so scroll all the way down the bottom of the page to where it gives you the Text Link option. In the text box you will see something like the following:
<a href="http://www.votations.com/asp/survey.asp?pollid=139785">This is a Test</a>
From this, copy just the part between the quotes. This is the URL or web address of your survey. If you cut and paste this into a browser you will see your survey as respondents will see it. This is the link that you will give to people in order for them to respond to your survey. You can send this link out by email or you can print it on yers and hand it out to people. 3
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Step 6: Editing Your Survey and Viewing Your Results
You will notice that after saving you have a large number of options running down the right hand side of the screen...