I use SurveyMonkey and a few other hosted survey platforms for a number of projects. Generally, these are great tools and I recommend them routinely to others.
One significant limitation is that they assume that the group of respondents completing a survey is unrelated to the group completing another survey.
In my work, this is often not true. Instead, it is more typical that we are surveying the same population on multiple occasions over time. For example, an individual may complete an entry survey and then complete additional ones at regular intervals during the project and upon exit.
In these cases we are, among other things, interested in change over time within an individual and among the group, and also in comparison to another group of individuals. Most often, we are examining the effect of some kind of intervention by studying change over time or the effect in an intervention compared to a control group.
However, since we can’t examine an individual’s responses over the course of the surveys, what we end up doing is exporting the discrete result sets from each and then importing them to a database where they are linked by some unique ID. It’s not straightforward but it’s entirely workable.
It would be very helpful to see one of the hosted survey platforms develop the ability to set up surveys appropriate for these kinds of panel studies. This would allow us to quickly review responses from a given person over time. At the group level, we could adjust aspects of the intervention on the fly without having to switch gears and set up the analytical environment.
In addition, it would be helpful to tie the responses of an individual in one survey to the questions or answers presented to the same individual in another survey. In other words, cross-survey logic. Right now, as far as I can tell, it’s missing from all the options I’ve used.
