A crucial piece of any online survey is data cleaning. Doing so ensures the quality of your survey results are completely accurate and trustworthy. The time it takes to clean your survey data will vary based on who you have sent the survey invitation to.
Whether it be a research participant panel, a list of current customers, or your social media followers responding to your online survey – once their completes start to roll in, it is time to start cleaning the data.
In this video, you will learn 4 tips for cleaning survey data, during or after fieldwork.
1. Duplicate responses
If a survey taker learns they have been disqualified from a survey to move forward in the research project, they may try to take the questionnaire again with new answers. In other cases, a slow page load time could result in participants hitting the submit button multiple times, resulting in many responses from the same person.
Check for duplicate responses by looking at:
- The same IP addresses
- The same email addresses
- The time responses are submitted
Regardless of the situation a step towards obtaining clean, accurate survey data is ensuring participants only take the survey once.
2. Time to complete
Depending on the time and type of questions in a survey, the average time for participants to complete a survey online will vary. For example, it will take participants a longer time to answer a 15 open-ended question survey over a 5 multiple choice questionnaire.
Understand the average time it should take respondents to complete your online survey. Take a closer look at surveys that were answered too quickly or too long. This means survey takers either rushed through the questions, not offering their honest feedback or took longer to look up answers on the Internet, wanting to provide the “right” answer.
3. Straightlining
What is straightlining? In market research, straightlining is the act of respondents choosing the same, consecutive answer down a line of questions on a survey. This could be selecting the first answer on every multiple choice question or selecting the highest number on every sliding scale question.
To check for straightlining among speedy survey takers, researchers can view a quick sort or create a formula in Excel to clearly identify those who answered the same number for all grid responses.
4. Review open-ends for nonsensical responses
When asking open-ends in online surveys, researchers do not always receive quality answers from their participants (as much as we wish we did). Review open-ended questions to look for answers that do not make sense, include random characters, or are blank.
If you are looking to collect more quality feedback from your target audience or customers, consider adding an in-depth interview or a phone survey to your research project. These types of research methodologies often result in more valuable and actionable answers because a moderator can ask participants to elaborate on their feedback.
Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team has the knowledge and tools to design a robust market research study, should it be the right fit for your business.
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