e-Surveys
Sue Froggatt Training & Consultancy
- Reduced costs: No interviewers, no telephone charges, no paper, no printing, no postage and no data entry.
- No interviewer bias
- Increased accuracy: No transcription errors
- Reduced Time: Survey responses start coming in within minutes of contact.
- Increased flexibility: E-surveys enhance design flexibility by permitting questionnaire changes on the fly.
- They can improve quota achievement through up-to-the-minute monitoring.
- Surveys can be designed that interactively adapt based on respondents’ prior answers.
 They are recommended if:
- You can provide a quality population list having a high proportion of current and accurate e-mail addresses
- The population of interest typically uses computers and the Internet in their day-to-day working lives
- You need to contact a large sample, or possibly even the entire population
- You need to screen a large population to find rare but important members
- The survey is concise and well-structured enough to be comfortably completed in one sitting.
They are problematical if:
- The population of interest is not connected, or a good list of e-mail addresses is not available
- It is critical that results represent all members of the population, not just those with access to the Internet
- Questioning is lengthy, complex, or requires respondents to look up information
- Questioning is mostly exploratory and uses lots of open-ended questions.