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description: Why we created this solution.
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# Background & Purpose

## Purpose of Your Survey Finder

The purpose of this user document is to create an all-in-one survey training and selection tool that allows professionals who use surveys, such as researchers, statisticians, and businessmen, to overcome challenges of selection with thousands of survey options. We propose this survey selection tool for efficient survey selection as well as to learn more about survey platforms before using them.

## Background of Surveys

Surveys are an inexpensive yet powerful tool commonly used in all fields that help gain insight into people’s views and experiences. With thousands of survey platforms to select from, users face challenges in effectively selecting the survey tool that best suits their needs.&#x20;

### History of Surveys&#x20;

Surveys have only been around for less than 200 years with the earliest survey being conducted in 1834 in London \[1]. Surveys were born out of the needs of modern state bureaucracies as leading countries constantly required data about people, which became expensive to collect manually with population growth \[2]. However, over the past 200 years, people have become very familiar with surveys as the US Census Bureau requires every person to partake in their surveys.&#x20;

### Existing Attempts at Survey Matching&#x20;

Finding a survey platform that best suits a user is not a new concept. Many researchers have written papers about the importance of survey platforms, but they often limit themselves to a user base, such as undergraduate students \[3] or hyper-focus on a platform, such as Google Forms \[4]. Of the papers our team has researched \[3,4] on survey platforms, none give a specific use-case for each type of different user groups. There is a clear gap in connecting users with the best platform for their needs.&#x20;

### COVID-19 Increases Survey Use&#x20;

The pandemic serves as a catalyst in growing the use of surveys. Fast gathering of information has now become directly linked with people’s health. Previously, research was conducted on surveys of the pandemic where survey quality was assessed through the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Checklist \[5]. The article highlights the widespread usage of surveys in the pandemic and supports the idea that the quality of responses is impacted by the data collection mode \[6]. As the pandemic continues to be a part of our lives, people have become accustomed to checking websites for COVID-19 tracking in their schools, workplaces, and cities. In addition, these organizations commonly employ surveys as a way to gather information about their people. As each website displays data in different ways, people are becoming more familiar than ever with not only surveys but also the different ways in which their results are displayed.

### Challenges in Selecting Survey Platforms&#x20;

Our team’s experience has shown that one of the biggest factors dissuading users from researching each survey platform on their own is time. Through the use of a questionnaire, we would efficiently connect users with an appropriate survey platform. The qualities of a good questionnaire include conciseness, question organization, and transition paragraphs that aid continuity \[7]. To emphasize our research on survey platforms, our questionnaire will be based on a survey with an effective scoring system. Challenges also exist when creating web-based surveys including sampling, response rates, non respondent characteristics, maintenance of confidentiality, and ethical issues. Andrew Clark states “three broad reasons for anonymizing data, the first to ‘protect’ or hide the identity of research participants, the second to disguise the identification of research locations and the third to comply with legal requirements on privacy” \[8, p. 34]. Software survey tool companies also aim to distinguish their products from others with different functionalities \[9]. Users struggle to select the best survey platform that matches their need for data collection and file creation with the best pricing, data encrypting, accessibility, and usability needs. Many survey tools fail to meet usability guidelines in compliance and don’t fulfill the requirements of selecting a diverse group of users including disabilities such as color blindness \[10]. Researchers concluded that future developers and designers of surveys need to focus on providing better user documentation and designing a questionnaire layout to accommodate a diverse group of users \[10].

## Project Scope and Constraints

Due to a lack of time, in order for our training modules to be detailed and insightful to our users, we had to choose the most popular survey platforms to compare and contrast while still allowing for them to be distinct amongst each other. Thus, we chose 6 platforms based on their popularity and diverse usages. Due to a lack of funding, we didn’t have full access to the highest tiers of each of the six platforms we researched, such as an enterprise account. Thus, we combined information from each platform’s main page as it had detailed instructions and guidelines as to what the paid version of the platform would entail, as well as external sources like reviews of the platform. We also took advantage of free trials that the platforms offered to get a more detailed account of each platform. Given more funding, we could go further to explore each survey platform in even more detail as well as expand to other platforms. With the limited budget for our project, we used a free survey scoring platform (Interact.com) for our questionnaire because it offered a free scoring functionality. However, for future improvements, we wish to use a better or more complicated scoring system. Moreover, including more specific questions for the questionnaire by personalizing the experience for users would also be helpful.



