Large Survey Process Step 4
Step 4a. Upload a copy of your survey.
Provide a copy of your survey as a searchable pdf file
Why do we ask this question on the Large Survey Request Form?
By making copies of surveys available in our Past Large Surveys Directory, we help other researchers like yourself find existing sources of data, learn what projects have been conducted before, and coordinate survey projects about similar topics.
Tips for best practice: Programming your survey
Lots of companies provide survey software platforms. At Wake, two of the more common are Qualtrics and Google Forms.
Qualtrics “is an easy-to-use, full-featured, web-based tool for creating and conducting online surveys and generating reports without having any previous programming knowledge.” Jeff Nichols () and Richard King () are our Qualtrics gurus on campus.
Google Forms is also available to conduct online surveys. The Help Desk is available for support so too are LinkedIn Learning courses (WFU account login required).
Step 4b. Provide the best ESTIMATE for how many minutes your survey will take to complete.
How long will your survey take?
Why do we ask this question on the Large Survey Request Form?
To help us review and schedule large survey requests, the Large Survey Request Form will ask you to estimate how long it will take participants to complete your survey.
Tips for best practice
Telling your participants how long the survey will take them to complete will improve your response rates. If participants don’t know how long the survey will take, they may quit partway through if they get frustrated or don’t have enough time set aside.
In both the invitations you send participants and the survey itself, tell participants how long the survey will take them to complete.
If you’re using a survey someone else created, the authors probably list an estimated completion time.
If you created your own survey, a rough estimate is: eight simple multiple choice questions per minute, and three simple write-in questions per minute. Thus, if your survey had 24 multiple choice items (24/8 = 3) and 4 write-in questions (4/3 = 1.33), your survey would take about 5 minutes (3 + 1.33 + some rounding = 5) to complete.
The best way to estimate how long your survey will take is to ask a few volunteers to complete it.
If you don’t have any helpful volunteers or completion-time estimates from the survey authors, this quick survey completion-time calculator will give you a rough time-completion estimate. If your questions are harder or more complex, this calculator will underestimate your survey’s completion time.
Survey Completion-Time Calculator
One more best practice: Consent items protect the confidentiality of your participants and the integrity of your data
We suggest that you include a consent item in your survey. In the first survey item, tell participants the terms of your survey: what the survey is about, approximately how long it will take, the extent of any confidentiality protections, what you plan to do with the data after you collect it, and if there are any participation incentives. Then ask participants if they consent to the terms. They can only participate in the survey if they consent.
Even if your survey is completely anonymous, this consent process ensures that your participants understand exactly what the terms of participation are. After the data are gathered, the terms in your consent make sure that you use the data only for those purposes agreed to by the participants.
Here is a real-life example of a simple consent statement for a survey of undergraduate students that gathered participants’ names and email addresses:
If you are using a survey being administered by another organization and/or if your project is being reviewed by the IRB, you will probably be required to have a consent process. If not, we encourage you to create one.
Questions? Contact us at