The School of Psychology and Neuroscience has adopted Qualtrics as its primary package for online human data collection. Qualtrics has a number of advantages for use in human research in psychology that meets both the needs of researchers and ethics committees. Just a few of these advantages include:
- Qualtrics can handle a wide-range of question types with lots of options to meet very diverse research needs.
- As well as simple linear questionnaire design, Qualtrics allows various flow options to display questions only under certain conditions, or to set up fairly complex flow arrangements to implement experimental designs.
- Qualtrics has built in quota management so when certain sample quota characteristics are met respondents can be sent a custom message or redirected to a different study.
- If you are running a longitudinal study, participants can be sent customised links to keep track of who has responded, and to allow targeted reminder messages.
- Data are stored securely on the Qualtrics server located in the EU to meet EU data requirements.
- Research teams can collaborate on surveys, but access control can be fine-tuned. For example, collaborators can look but not edit, or edit but not release the survey, or see the data but not make changes and so on. This fine-tuned collaboration addresses ethics concerns about who has access to data on specific projects.
- Researchers and teams of researchers can share commonly used questions and blocks in a library for re-use in other projects.
- Advanced users can use Java Script to tweak specific behaviours if standard options are not sufficient.
Our license allows unlimited surveys and responses for all staff, postgraduate and undergraduate students in the school.
Although the Qualtrics set-up is late for everyone to use in the 2013/2014 academic year we hopes that there will be a gradual take up of Qualtrics this year and a building of experience to support greater usage in 2014.
This site includes locally useful information for Qualtrics users in Psychology and Neuroscience, but also our goal is to create a site with a collection of tips, tricks and useful features to support Qualtrics in research more generally.
Ken Mavor, September 2013.