Bristol Online Surveys in one page
Bristol Online Surveys - Getting Going
What it is
Bristol online surveys or BOS is a service from the ILRT - use it to create straightforward surveys that work via the web.
This is a paid-for service - the University has a licence.
To use Bristol Online Surveys you'll need an account - ask your school/department BOS administrator - you'll be issued with a username and password. (To find your admin person, contact us). When you have an account, log in here.
Help with Bristol Online Surveys
You'll find BOS's web based help is there for you - and it's good. If you're stuck, contact IT training as we can help too.
Administering BOS
At Bath Spa University we have people with the following roles:
- A primary contact
- This person is the contact point for the University's BOS account and initially set up others to administer accounts
- Administrators
- These work at school or department level and can set up user accounts for others that need to create and deploy surveys. To identify your school or department BOS administrator, ask others - or ask the University's primary contact.
If you're a BOS admin at BSU, here's more on the rôle. - Users
- Users are able to create and deploy BOS surveys - and analyse results.
Survey Respondents
These are people who fill in your survey - they don't need an account and don't need to be members of the University. You make surveys available via the web - anyone with a link to the survey can use a web browser to fill it in. In practice, you may be able to control things to avoid opening up access to the whole world, but by default, you can make surveys very widely available.
Responsibilities of Users
If you use the University's Bristol Online Surveys account, bear the following in mind. Users create surveys under the aegis of the University - essentially writing web pages that reflect on the University's standing. If you design a survey, bear that in mind. If you have doubts about the suitability of a survey, discuss it with your BOS admin person - don't wait for them to come to you ...
A question of ethics
When collecting personal data from your respondents, you'll need to work within ethical guidelines - including possibly those set by your school. It's a very good idea to check before deploying a survey.
Survey insights
BOS makes the task of creating a survey pretty painless - and their help pages are good.
Survey questions come in various forms, and some will create work for you. Avoid literal questions: here's an example, using a question that asks 'What is your favourite colour?'.
- Free text = more work
- Give people a text field into which they can type their reply. This is known as a literal question and allows a wide variety of replies that you will have to analyse 'by hand'.
- Multiple choice = analysis is straightforward
- Replace a literal question and you can save yourself a lot of work at a later stage. In the case of that colour question, use a multiple choice approach instead - provide a list of colours from which your respondents can pick their favourite - this approach provides data which you can analyse automatically.
Likert scales: avoid giving your respondents the 'Middle option'
Sometimes, it's useful to ask a question of the sort 'How much do you agree with ...' - the replies being 'Not at all', 'Somewhat disagree' 'Agree a little' 'Strongly agree'. This is a Likert scale question. Sometimes it's good to use an even number of options - not to offer a 'Middle ground', this forces the people who would otherwise pretend to be neutral on an issue, to reveal how they actually feel.
Snagging
The survey editing tool has a 30 minute timeout - that's 30 minutes of editing - not thirty minutes of activity. So when you're working on a survey page, save it regularly otherwise the 30 minute timeout might trip you up. If you find you can't save a page, select its contents and copy the lot - paste them to a text editor such as Textpad or Windows Notepad - later you can copy and paste text from your rescued resource to the survey once more.
Mark Annand • Site updated April 12th 2013 • Site Counter:
All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.
Words found on a door lintel in the garden of a house in the Cretan village of Argiroupolis.
The lintel is a fragment from the city state Lappa, which occupied the same site.
Fifteen hundred years later, when you use the web, from time to time you might well feel that the author was on to something. And if you work with particle physics, you'll know he was ...