Research Surveys » Academic Surveys

Collect the data you need to fund your projects and impress your Academic institutions worldwide by using our survey software to conduct online surveys and gather data to support funded research projects. And if you currently are an active student you can use our survey software gratis.

Survey Goal

Before starting your Academic Survey, you will need to clearly define your survey goal. This will help you focus on the right questions you ask in your survey.

Here are examples of Academic Survey goals:

• Survey Goal Sample #1: To determine student satisfaction with three main campus areas: the Quad, Cafe and Library.
• Survey Goal Sample #2: To gather comprehensive data on a father’s role with their newborn son in the first 4-weeks postpartum. This data will be used to complete my doctoral thesis and determine the outline for my impending book.

To learn more about survey goals and questions, please visit our Survey Questions page.

Survey Questions

Your academic survey questions will be dependent on your survey goal. Regardless of your goal, you will need to carefully word your survey questions for maximum response rates and survey completion. When designing a survey you should only include questions that meet your survey goal.

If you are asking respondents to rate satisfaction with variables for a specific academic area, you may want to use a table of radio buttons questions.

In this example, respondents are asked to rate their satisfaction with three variables in the category of students. The table of radio button question allows a variety of lengths for the variables that you are testing, as well as flexibility for your ratings scale.

You might want to have your survey reviewed by a variety of peers and stake-holders. If so, be sure to send a test link to all necessary reviewers so that they can not only review the survey questions, but take the survey as if they were an actual respondent. This will make it easier for them to provide accurate feedback.

You also might want to utilize the SurveyGizmo Add Note feature to collaborate with colleagues on the survey build. You can note any changes and the reason why these changes were made so that colleagues do not overwrite your updates.

Survey Example

SurveyGizmo has several pre-built survey templates to help you get started. These can easily be customized to meet your needs.

Click on image for interactive academic survey example

Since academic surveys tend to be very diverse, there is not really a set of standard questions to ask. Please use this sample as a guide to build a survey that is in-line with your survey goal.

Survey Reports

Please be sure to run your survey reports with test data prior to fielding your survey. This way you can make sure that your survey and reports are built to meet your specific survey specifications.

If you use a radio button question to ask respondents to rate satisfaction with variables
for a specific academic area, in this case students, your results would look something like this:

Click image to demo an interactive Academic Survey report

Based on this data, respondents are most satisfied with student ability and motivation, with 20.3 percent saying that they are very satisfied with this variable. If you want to dig deeper and compare respondent opinions about this variable, then you could run a comparison report:

Click image to explore this Comparison Report

Comparison reports show counts for res in groups so that you can compare responses across a selected group of respondents. In this case, we chose to group responses by how long a respondent has been teaching at the school. From this data, it looks like the longer a teacher is teaching at the school the less satisfied they are with student abilities and motivation.

Please note that all data used in these examples is test data and not actual survey data.

Additional Resources

Sometimes you need some industry background before conducting your survey. Here are some resources that may help you with this material:

WebLens

Google Scholar Search