Playing around in Qualtrics

Qualtrics can simply be classified as an information gathering technology that is used mainly in survey form and other data collection modes. It is one of the main research tools in most academic settings, and widely adopted across the Ohio University campus. The use experience has been great for me so far but also challenging. While the interface is easy to use and follow, building effective surveys or questionnaires with this is more challenging that it seems.

My starting skill level in this game was at the beginner to intermediate level. While I have used this in the past, it had been to build very basic surveys and the interface has been extensively updated since my last use.

Playing around Qualtrics this time has been a good learning experience this time around. As mentioned above, while building a simple questionnaire in Qualtrics is easy. It takes some playing around to find some really interesting features. For example, including logic questions with embedded if, and, or statements can help a researcher build different levels into surveys. In addition, there are so many fascinating and different ways to structure questions and the previews actually make it really easy to understand the various structure and types of questions.

The one thing that is interesting and you will think will have been figured out by now is the background stuff. For example, saving the same surveys in the different interfaces you can get to them gives you very dramatic experiences. Sometimes you get the new interface where you can update all aspects of the survey, other times, you get a very stripped-down version which does not enable you to do as much.

 The reason I chose to write about Qualtrics is the fact that, at least on this campus and most other university campus, it is a tool that is available and used widely. In addition, from using this, a lot of research classes and methodology for designing questionnaire’s made sense from seeing the different question types that is possible. It also seems to be a very easy way to introduce some aspects of coding to people who are not necessarily coders with the logic statements and ability to stratify questions or blocks of different surveys.