Survey design & authoring

Questionnaire creation involves many facets and many hands: authoring new questions, re-using the "tried and true," securing client approvals, formatting paper surveys, routing and testing complex logic... the list is virtuallyendless. Although we realize that users are all very different, our decadesof experience have identified four distinct user profiles:

Mechanics, who bring questionnaires written elsewhere (approximately 80% of which are in Microsoft Word) into the computer-assisted interviewing world
Do-It-Yourselfers, who design simple ad hoc surveys via a browser GUI
Researcher executives, who work either in a Web browser or Windows desktop application
Survey administration professionals, who needs to do more than author questionnaires, such as activation to multiple interviewing modes, linking sample to projects, and managing the research projects

No single application can meet the demands and varying interface requirements of these diverse user communities, even within a single organization. As a pioneer in survey design tools, SPSS provides tools for each method of survey authoring. All are designed for the professional market researcher, supporting the most sophisticated functionality for real research—in an open and extensible format, so they’re easy to integrate with survey libraries, support tracking studies, etc. Our authoring tools support any language, including multi-byte character sets, and can centrally manage multilingual versions without requiring format or data capture changes.

See a case example of how authoring may be handled in the real world.

Survey Design and Authoring