Online Survey Makers

While I didn't sign up for an account of all the survey generators, I have to say I think survey monkey was the best. It seemed to be the only service that wasn't just offering a free survey feature to get me to buy a more advanced account. QuestionPro seemed to be the most guilty of this, especially when I looked at their prices for a yearly account, $4999 the best. But QuestionPro also seemed to offer the best features of the bunch to justify why purchasing an account would be worthwhile.

I found SurveyMonkey usable. It was easy to create a survey, and their descriptions were accurate to what the type of question would be, but I wasn't sure how the questions would look until I saw the final version. It would be nice if they had a graphical interface... On the flip side, I realize that is a lot to ask from a free service, so I have no major complaints. Although, it would be nice if I was notified when people had filled out the survey via email.

The library has a pro account with SurveyMonkey. Can you think of surveys that might be interesting to conduct either in-house or among community members?

The library should make even more use of the pro account than we already do. There was the lintranet redesign committee survey, which the litranet redesign committee used to gain information. And there was that other survey, the one I can't remember, but I do remember filling it out... anyway as long as we attach food/candy to surveys I think we can use it for all sorts of feedback both with the public and internally. I think it would be neat if we could link surveys about library policy to the public computer log-ins. But I don't want to force people to take surveys...

The lack of open-ended questions is what always bothered me about standarized tests. I felt that having a finite answer that could just as easily be correct by guessing isnt' the best way to determine knowledge. Open-ended questions for some surveys are much the same way. The quality of answers may be higher if people are allowed to think out their answers, and we might get better comments and ideas. But there is more reluctance to take time to do a good job on open-ended surveys so the pool would most likely be smaller. As you can see I've used a lot of qualifiers in this last part of the post, and that is because I really don't know people would react, or the quality of responses we would get. A mix of check the box and open-ended questions seems to be the best for getting more advanced answers, while offering people the option of expressing their individual opinions. Although, people who express opinions on surveys usually are people with strong opinions, not people with moderate opinions...