Survey Development
The Office of Research can help with all aspects of survey development and administration for both research and continuous quality improvement purposes at no cost for paid faculty or volunteer faculty working with residents or students on a project. If you already have a survey developed, our office will review it as well as make suggestions for improvement and/or adaptation to an online survey format. If you do not have your survey developed, we can help you develop and format appropriate questions to address your needs.
Once the survey is developed, there are several ways we can go about distribution and follow-up:
- You can provide us with a list and we can distribute the survey directly through REDCap, which allows us to import names and e-mail addresses. Each respondent will receive a link specific to his/her e-mail, allowing us to personalize the e-mails, which increases response rates and allows us to send follow-ups only to those who have not responded. In addition, an exact response rate can be calculated. This option allows us to track which individuals have completed the survey, therefore, the survey responses are not truly anonymous.
- We can provide you with a link to distribute via broadcast e-mail or place on a website, which will allow truly anonymous responses. When this option is used, everyone will receive follow-up e-mails, even if they have already completed the survey. However, with this option it is often difficult to determine a response rate.
- If necessary, we could also do a combination of the two, although this makes reporting response rates even trickier.
- Once the responses are collected, we provide a basic report that includes means and standard deviations for continuous data (like age or income) and frequencies for categorical data (gender, department, etc.). We can also create graphs or tables as well as perform additional sophisticated data analysis depending on your needs.