The SRC uses the Qualtrics online survey system for research projects that require online data collection. All Princeton students and faculty members can create their own Qualtrics accounts and conduct their own online surveys. SRC staff can provide guidance on the best ways to design your online questionnaire to maximize ease of use and ensure accuracy of responses. Qualtrics offers a wide range of options for formatting different types of questions, including single and multiple response questions, ratings scales, “drag and drop” rankings and questions on numeric distributions that sum to a fixed amount. Qualtrics also enables skip and display logic based on responses to previous questions or pre-loaded information about sample members. Qualtrics also allows randomized display of response choices, random presentation of questions within a defined block of questions, or randomly ordering of entire blocks of questions. Respondents can also be randomly sorted into multiple treatment and control groups at any point in a questionnaire.
The SRC has an extensive range of resources for developing samples for web-based surveys, ranging from low-cost convenience samples to representative panel samples and specialized populations. The Qualtrics mailer is used to distribute survey invitations via email or via SMS text messaging. The mailer enables reminder messages to go only to sample members who have not yet completed an interview. Reminder messages can also be sent to sample members who partially complete their interviews. In such cases, returning respondents are skipped immediately to the point where they dropped off after their previous attempt at completion.
Data from completed interviews can be downloaded in a variety of formats, some of which include variable labels and value labels. The SRC is able to translate data in any statistical format (such as R, SPSS, STATA, SAS, Excel or MATLAB) into any format required by the researcher. The center also assists researchers with acquiring census data needed for the design of post-stratification weights.