Choosing survey software. How to decide and what to consider

Software solutions for conducting online surveys have proliferated over the last few years. The market is highly diversified, satisficing nearly every need. There are low cost solutions (some even free of charge) and professionell products ranging from a few hundred euros to some thousand and ten thousands euros. These cost intensive solutions afford high scaled, world wide, multiple language survey designs, especially suited for enterprises. Cheap solutions might sound promising. However, they might end in higher costs compared to higher priced software due to the inhouse implementation and additional adaptation work needed.

Software can speed up the implementation process of a survey, while allowing various configurations, features and designs at the same time. Software helps to avoid typical errors and flaws with state of the art presets and solutions. Standards developed in the field of online survey methodology are already implemented in enhanced software solutions (e.g. save&continue feature). Some software products provide solutions for problems which possibly become prominent in a later stage of the survey process (e.g. data validation and cleaning). Further important advantages of software solutions include data integrity, availability of the survey, scalability, and security of your data.

There are a number of questions to answer when considering a software product:

• Number of times you want to use the survey
• Time allocated for technical set up and getting the paper version online
• Number of completed answers and number of contacts
• Date range (time the survey should be online)
• Contact method (e-mail, postal letter, telephone, etc.)
• Personalized or anonym survey
• Open survey or survey with restricted access
• Types of questions (sentences, audio, pictures, etc.)
• Types of answer design (check boxes vertical, multiple choice horizontal, open
• answer fields etc.)
• Budget

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