Surveys

Here's a quick checklist to help you make sure you have everything you need before publishing your survey.

• IRB Consent form

  • The first block will be your consent form. Add two buttons: Accept and Do not accept, where if a survey participant selects the Do not accept option, the survey navigates to the end and terminates.

• Demographics

  • Name, DOB, Age, Gender, SES, Race, email (important if you are going to send them a monetary bonus), etc.

• Survey/Task Instructions

  • If necessary, include a few comprehension checks. If participants fail the comprehension check, this will help you determine whether their responses were invalid. To create a comprehension check, simply write a few questions that quiz them on key elements of the task or survey.

• Attention/ “Catch” trials:

  • Be sure to add in a few attention checks in your survey (a general heuristic is to increase the number of checks include have as your question set gets larger).
  • Some examples can be to have your survey respondents do math (please indicate on the scale the solution to five minus three) or select a particular direction (please select the leftmost button).
  • You’ll want to write these questions so that they don’t stand out too much, otherwise even someone who is selecting buttons at random will be able to catch it and give a correct answer.

• Randomization

  • With Qualtrics, you can randomize every question in the entire block, or select which questions to randomize if you need certain portions (such as a section that gives instructions) to remain static.