So you are starting work on your first online survey and you wonder how to begin. In the article below you will find a 7-step approach that will show you step-by-step how to conduct your survey on the Internet.
How to create a good CAWI survey – practical 7-step approach.
- Start with survey objective. Define what you need to learn and write it down on paper. This is very important step of your project, as it will determine all the other steps. Remember that research objective should be clear. Setting unclear objectives creates a risk of unclear and difficult-to-interpret survey results.
- Define your target group. Define who your respondent is and how many responses you need in order to make decisions based on your survey.
- Select research method, this means the way you will collect your responses. Tools like mysurveylab.com make it possible to collect responses by email, web, or Facebook and when precise targeting of certain groups is necessary by online survey panel.
- Create survey. Now you can start work on your survey. Remember that in web surveys your respondents won’t be able to ask you “What did you have in mind by it”. Therefore in CAWI surveys, it is very important to be clear, precise and use easy-to-understand language. If you are not sure that your respondent will understand a certain word replace it with another that will be easier to understand.
- Test your survey. Before you send your survey, test it. A small sample will be ok. Try to conduct your test on the group that is as close to your target group as possible.
- Conduct survey and collect responses. Now you are ready to start your online research. If you will send a survey invitation by email, probably not all of your respondents will answer at the first time. Therefore it is good to send a reminder after 2 – 3 days.
- Create report, analyze your data, and create survey results report. Survey tools like mysurveylab.com can automatically generate survey results reports. This is a big advantage of CAWI and big-time saver. As your project is finished collect observations and lessons learned. Those can be useful hints for you on your future projects.
CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interview) is an Internet surveying technique in which the interviewer follows a script provided on a website.