I'd recommend you to check limesurvey.com, I'm not sure about the current pricing politics, but the version we were using was free. The outcome data comes in a SPSS-compatible format, many question/scale types are supported, including branching options. It was the best and the most failure-free online survey tool I had an experience with.

Hi Charley,

SurveyMonkey is pretty popular and easy to use. Here's the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/

You can find this link helpful for pros and cons of the available tools:

http://whinot.com/blog/2012/4-online-survey-tools-which-one-is-best-for-you/

Hope that helps!

Satabdi

I was part of a project that had a 70+ question instrument with loads of subquestions (in total more than 200 questions), and they had decided that STATA would be more useful than SPSS.... however it requires creating commands for the variables. STATA is more complicated than using SPSS and to be honest i couldn't see why SPSS couldn't have done the same job.

OK so I've been looking around and SoGo seems to be a pretty good site. They have 50% off for faculty and academic rates as well as a free student account. The student account doesn't give you access to the "Enterprise" level and you have to write a blog about it in order to get the free account. This seems a little weird to me (I would gladly write something about a product after I've used it, but I cannot give an honest review of a program without actually using it, you know?). Has anyone ever used it? What are your thoughts? Any concerns?

Qualtrics is excellent and when you export it to SPSS you don't have to do any coding.  Just type in qualtrics.com   They have a free trial.

SurveyMonkey is can help

I have used Questionpro.com quite a lot. It is reliable, very easy to build the questionnaire and costs about 15$ per month for the professional license. You cannot export data directly to SPSS but you can export to excel and then it is easy to copy and paste the data into SPSS. (You can export directly into SPSS if you buy additional pricing option).

Charley,

I reviewed the answers above; in terms of quality of survey software, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, etc. are all good.  However, the IRB is the showstopper - most of these will not get through an IRB due to lack of the enhanced privacy requirements most IRBs have.

Interestingly, this problem of researchers wanting to use SurveyMonkey for human research was "solved" by Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap):  http://www.project-redcap.org/

Briefly, Vanderbilt U won an NIH CTSA award to build this software to make what I'd call informally an IRB-compliant, cheap, and academic SurveyMonkey.  The REDCap software is free but must be run on a server, so university and Veteran's Administration IT departments, for example, will support them.  I think their web site keeps a list up of who is running REDCap.

As an example, I'm doing a project at University of Florida (UF) using their REDCap installation: http://www.ctsi.ufl.edu/research/research-support/redcap/

I have a small business, but I am collaborating with someone at UF on this project, so REDCap was "free" for us (meaning we budgeted a little in our grant for support, but this would have probably been waived if the grant had been small).  Many colleges and Veteran's Administrations have a REDCap, so if someone on your research team is affiliated, you usually can use it for cheap or free.  

The main feature is that if there is a REDCap at an institution, IRBs insist that you use it as your study database.  It is both for internal data entry as well as online surveys.  Therefore, no IRB problems.

Now the downside:  REDCap is terribly clumsy, has a lot of limitations that you think it wouldn't have given what it's designed to do, is always evolving, is versioned differently at different organizations, and is poorly documented.  I would give it a C+ or a B- in terms of usefulness or quality as survey software.  SurveyMonkey et al. are by far superior.

However, the reality is that if you are collaborating with an institution with REDCap, you will need to use it, so you will probably do what I did and learn all the workarounds.  Ultimately, it works, but the descriptions given of it as being "perfect for research" are more optimistic than reality.

I hope this answer helps.  Good luck with your research!

-Monika

Hi,

If you want to do a online survey, kindly see the links below:

http://whinot.com/blog/2012/4-online-survey-tools-which-one-is-best-for-you/

http://blog.clientheartbeat.com/online-survey-tools/

http://www.sogosurvey.com/

I work with developing research proposals and in the external survey consultant group it appears that many of them use Qualtrics.  We are using it in the office I am with on surveys of professional development workshops for faculty/researchers. Your institution may have a site license which normally makes it much less expensive.  It is good for the analysis it does

We are using FILEMAKER on web to allow for paperless survey and demographic data collection in the social and health world. I am doing research in the domain of Familes, so surveys/questionnaires in the areas of health, social, quality of life, depression, drugs and etc.

FILEMAKER surveys allows us develop cheap, easy to use. Provides the ability to export data to xls and subsequently added to SPSS.

http://info2.filemaker.com/Global_Select_FileMaker_Pro_Trial.html

Surveymonkey could be counted on

Dear Charley Blunt,

RedCap might be a good solution for you. It is web based and on simple dependencies (php, apache, cURL, mysqli ext, mysql server, SMPT server) These are easily installable on a linux system like ubuntu (open source free linux platform).

http://projectredcap.org/participate.php

But the RedCap is itself not opensource. So it requires a license agreement signing and such red tapism., But it is worth the effort I believe.

If you are more adventurous you can try openclinica. It is a full fledged clinical research management software (based on java I guess). It has a whole lot of features and it is customizable. There are many CRF available online which can be used/modified or a new form can be made. It permits data export to SPSS. I have played a bit with openclinica about two years ago and found it to have great potential and use but I discovered it a bit late for my thesis (as I was already in the analysis stage when I found it! Alas!) But it requires training and it may not be practical if you are using user input data (the data is input by individual user and not by some trained individual). So if you are looking for user input data, I would not suggest openclinica.

There is another opensource tool: = openxdata. Try the demo here.

http://www.openxdata.org/demo/

https://nexus.openxdata.org/content/repositories/releases/org/openxdata/openXdata-installer/1.16.7/openXdata-installer-1.16.7.exe

That is all in one windows installer. Or you can download and install the server after getting in touch with your host.

It appears to be ideal for your use. It exports data as CSV file which can be imported into SPSS or SAS or even Excel!

And on more simplistic terms. Have you tried the Google Forms ? Speaking of security and ease of use ... and simple as well. You can use google forms and you can export the data as csv. A bit of data analysis and pruning might be required for use in SPSS but it's possible as well (any statistician can do that for you at a reasonable fee along with the analysis!) You just need to map the fields etc and convert data at times for appropriate analysis applicable.

Regards,

Dr. Akilesh R

India

Unipark: http://www.unipark.com/de/

It's not for free, but its way cheaper than $1.000. And it's good. Export to SPSS is a standard feature.

I wish I could individually like replies. Thank you all! I haven't made a decision yet. I was so far bouncing between Google Forms and SoGo, but now I'm going to check out some of these others. These are great ideas! Thank you all for the input! :)

Qualtrics pricing makes it only useful to institutional or larger business users; I'm talking tens of thousands.  RedCAP is only available to certain institutional users as well, but it does not cost a bunch of money.  Both have good functionality with respect to item types.  RedCAP seems more flexible to me than Qualtrics.  I'd love to be using RedCAP for my small business, but they don't allow that.

I've been using Constant Contact lately.  It's inexpensive and has good distribution features.  Item type is limited so it requires some creativity and all data are stored as binary (blank or 1), so you have to create an Excel sheet to transform, for example, a Strongly Agree ("5") on a five point Likert-type scale from "XXXX1" to "5."  Not designed for research really but also very good on HIPAA and other security features due to its general use for email marketing.

I used to use SurveyMonkey but got price sensitive due to the volume of surveying I was doing and it is also less flexible as to the look, feel and other identity features of a survey.  Constant Contact is good that way.

I'm going to look at limesurvey next.