Surveys and Rating Scales
Mail surveys or other paper and pencil questionnaires
Some populations are best covered by mail. Experimental designs often call for self-administered questionnaires that are most effectively delivered in paper and pencil format. The Survey Lab can create booklet-style, single-page, or flip-page questionnaires to use for self-administered forms and for mailout or leave-behind surveys. If you are creating your own instrument, we can supply you with survey templates to create attractive printed formats for a variety of question styles - standard force-choice, code-all-that-apply, grids, semantic differential, four and five-point scales and the like.
Phone surveys
The Lab has a 12-station CATI lab (computer-assisted telephone interviewing) with Sawtooth software. We can work from list samples or random digit dial samples. We screen cases for eligibility and schedule phone interview times at the convenience of the respondent whether that means business hours, evenings or weekends. Our student callers are articulate and polite. We can also program and carry out Spanish-language versions of surveys that cover both English and Spanish-speaking populations. In addition to phone surveys, the Survey Lab has also successfully used our calling center to carry out studies with experimental designs.
Web surveys
Our Sawtooth software permits us to host web surveys on our own server, supported by Social Sciences Computing. We can automatically send invitations and follow-up reminders to selected lists of email addresses. Participants receive unique passwords and may enter or leave the website as often as they like until they complete the questionnaire. The system saves responses from each session and the respondent returns to the point of past break-off each time he/she returns to the website.
Mixed mode designs
Our CATI software allows us to transfer phone respondents directly to a web version of the questionnaire. Answers already completed by phone will appear on the web form to which respondents are transferred. This arrangement allows us to recruit participation by phone and offer an immediate choice of phone or web administration. Further, phone respondents may ask to complete the survey online at any point during the phone interview.
Rating scales
Rating scales are tools developed for systematic observation that produce numeric data. Researchers in various fields have developed rating scales to measure such things as teacher performance in classrooms, quality of parent-child interaction or daycare center quality. Conducting a study with validated scales requires appropriate training in the administration of the instruments and on-going tests to assure inter-coder reliability. The Survey Lab hires, trains and supervises graduate students to carry out systematic observations using rating scales. We can also help you develop and/or test your own observational rating system.
