peter.eliasson said:
Soon I will start working on a paper where I will examine attitudes of small businesses. Therefor I would like to prepare a survey to send out to the companies to be filled in and returned.
How can I do this? Is there a good reliable software for this, to make a nice working survey?
If you want to make the survey yourself, then you're going to need certain things. I just finished a project like this for my gf. She needed an online survey to gather data for her thesis.
I don't know how much you know about html/php/hosting, etc., so I'll pretend you're a beginner.
#1 You need somewhere to host your survey. If you have broadband, then you can host it yourself. If not, then you need a proper web-host. If you host it yourself you can make a new account on your mac which has a better sounding name, e.g. ~business_survey.
#2 You'll need to know or learn HTML, PHP, CSS, and optionally MySQL.
#3 If you're hosting the survey yourself, you'll need to install PHP and MySQL. Not too hard to do. There are installers and instructions at entropy.ch
#4 You'll make the survey itself using HTML, styled with CSS. Then you'll need to use PHP (or some other scripting language, but PHP is the friendliest) to parse the data, verify it, manipulate it, whatever. Then you'll use PHP to insert the data into a MySQL database.
#5 Even if the survey is anonymous, you should send out emails which have unique IDs, so that you can look at your web server logs and see who has actually visited. Then you can send a second wave of emails out to those who haven't yet replied without giving hassle to those who have replied. If you're a quick learner, you can throw together an AppleScript to automatically generate personalised emails with a unique URL for your participants.
#6 If you are hosting the web server, then you can make backups of the database, otherwise you need to set up your host server so that it makes backups for you. You can have PHP send you an email with the replies, if you want.
#7 Depending on what program you're going to analyse your results in (Excel
or SPSS or whatever), you write the PHP to compile the results so that the data is easily exported. Or you can compile the results afterwards and use a text-editor to wrangle it into some form that your analysis program needs.
But, the hardest part is actually making your survey itself so that the answers give a real result, but I'm sure you're aware of that.
Resources: Get yourself an O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf subscription ($9.99 per month for 5 books), and read 'Programming PHP' by Rasmus Lerdorf. It's an excellent introduction to programming and doesn't assume you know anything. Use php.net, dev.myql.com, and google, and you can solve most problems. If you decide to go the DIY route, it'll be long and hard, but I can testify that you'll come out the other side a better man. You'll then be able to tackle most web-based projects...
If you want more help, send me a pm.
