5 Steps to a Successful Online Survey

Step 1: Define Your Research Goals

Before you can set up your (quantitative) online survey, it is of utmost importance to define your research questions and hypotheses. They can be are developed based on a literature and theoretical framework. The hypotheses must be formulated in a way they can later be tested (i.e. verified or falsified) via the means of the survey.

Step 2: Decide on What Questions You Want to Ask

You can only reach your research goals if you ask the right questions! When formulating your survey questions, be aware that you can choose from a number of different types like open questions, closed questions, matrix table questions, and single- or multi-response questions. If the research goal allows it, you can always mix and match. Also, keep in mind that participants don’t have to fill in questions that are not relevant to them. Last but not least, always make sure to use simple language and avoid ambiguity!

Tip: Before getting the questions out to your participants, ask friends and family to try out the survey. This way you still have the chance to adapt and improve your survey. This piloting phase serves to make final adjustments to the questionnaire, e.g. regarding the wording or length of questions. 

Step 3: Determine Your Sampling Strategy and Invite Your Research Participants

The selection of survey participants is crucial to ensure that the survey results are representative of a certain population and that there are no inherent biases within the sample. After defining a target population, a sampling strategy is developed to select a specific number of participants based on a defined set of characteristics (age, gender, etc.) which mirror the composition of the targeted population. Depending on the research interest, there are different strategies that can be employed (such as systematic sampling or stratified sampling). Once you determined your target group, you can decide on how to best reach your participants. Distribution methods range from social media channels like Facebook or LinkedIn to email invites, SMS or website banners.

Tip: Don’t forget to get the participants’ consent! Before you can distribute your online survey, decide on how to gain the consent of your respondents. It is important to give potential survey participants sufficient information on the survey for them to decide whether they want to take part in your study.

Step 4: Gather Your Responses

When conducting an online survey, the response rate is an important keyword. To increase the response rate, you might want to think about offering an incentive to the participants such as specific gifts or the chance to win a lottery. Another way to keep them engaged is to promise to share the results of your research with your participants.

Step 5: Analyse Your Results

After the data collection, use your data to test the hypotheses and to look for correlation of variables. Based on the results of the survey you can draw conclusions for a larger part of the population for which the survey is representative. In this context, it is important to put particular emphasis on the cautious interpretation of results and to be aware of the weaknesses of this research method. While surveys have the advantage of gathering data from a large sample, they cannot explain the motivations or opinions of each participant, which can be accomplished through additional qualitative research. 

Tip: Try and visualise your data by presenting the results in charts and graphs, this will help you to interpret the results obtained through the survey.

Get Started!

Conducting online surveys is a pretty straightforward and cost-effective way to achieve your research goals and answer your research question. Following the above-mentioned steps, you will be collecting and analysing your first survey results in no time!