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Methods of Administering Web-based Surveys
There are three different ways to administer Web-based surveys on BU's Web
servers. These methods differ in two areas: your survey's respondents and your
survey's data.
The three methods are as follows:
Publicly administered and anonymous
This is by far the easiest type of survey to create. Since you want anybody to
be able to take the survey, no special restrictions have to be in place. You can
create this type of survey using only PonyExpress.
Benefits
- It's easy to create and administer.
- Anybody with the URL can respond.
- No special restriction is necessary.
- Uses just PonyExpress.
Drawbacks
- Unable to verify identity of respondent.
- Unable to restrict audience.
- Unable to eliminate duplicate respondents.
For example, see the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation's Webcast
Survey.
Restricted audience, anonymous
This survey type is similar to the publicly administered, anonymous survey in
that you collect no identifying information from your users. Unlike the above
survey, however, you can choose to limit the potential respondents by using an
.htaccess file.
Benefits
- You can focus survey on specific members of the BU community in order
to maintain a consistent response base.
- You can limit survey to specific BU users, BU status (faculty, staff,
etc.), BU department, or create a special username/password pair to distribute
to anyone.
Drawbacks
- Unable to eliminate duplicate respondents.
- You must add an .htaccess file.
- It's slightly more complicated to create.
Here is example of a restricted
audience, anonymous form.
Restricted audience, non-anonymous respondent
For this method, you can use Formlogin in conjunction with a standard
PonyExpress-enabled HTML form. Formlogin gets information about your Web site's
visitors from BU's PH database--the same database that serves the online Directory.
You can adapt your Web forms to submit some, all, or none of this information
to your tab-delimited file. You accomplish this by inserting special Formlogin
variables into your form fields.
Benefits
- Automatically filled fields give a sense of personalization to your survey.
- Since Formlogin uses Kerberos authentication, it allows you to verify
the identity of your respondents.
Drawbacks
- Formlogin can only be used for respondents within the BU community.
- Respondents must have a BU login name and Kerberos password.
- It's slightly more complicated to create.
Here is an example of a form using
Formlogin. You can see that it asks the user for their BU login
name and Kerberos password, and then automatically fills in some
information. Here is the same form without
Formlogin to illustrate the use of the special variables.
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