On online survey questionnaire - a brief note

Students doing dissertation projects or mini-dissertation projects (e.g. in the name of independent study) very often need to conduct online questionnaire survey. First of all, you need to study the research method of survey (e.g. Bailey (1994; Part 2). There are also articles about online surveys in business journals. Online survey facility  such as mysurvey.tw is free of charge.

Your survey questionnaire should be designed to support your research investigation needs, which should, in turn, be informed by your literature review. You also need to have knowledge of statistics, ie, descriptive statistics and statistical methods such as multiple regresssion analysis and chi-square test. You should also have some knowledge on the notions of reliability and validity in research methods. Armed with knowledge in research methods and statistics, you are now in a position to design an online  survey questionnaire.

When teaching and supervising students to do dissertation and independent study projects, I set up facebook forums for students so that they can post their online survey questionnaire in the forums for other fellow classmates to respond. This arrangement is feasible when there is a relatively large class size (or when you have lots of friends in your facebook).  It is a good practice to carry out a pilot survey to learn feedbacks on your survey questionnaire, as some of wordings are not clear in meaning to the respondents.

Photos on kwiksurveys.com operations

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References

1. Bailey, K.D. (1994) Methods of Social Research, Free Press.
2. Web-based questionnaire notes: http://lap.umd.edu/survey_design/questionnaires.html
3. Research methods blog articles: http://josephho33.blogspot.com/2011/09/research-methods-reading-list-of-blog.html