A Program for Conducting Polls
Public opinion surveys have become an American obsession. And they’re not just for TV networks and politicians. Businesses, nonprofit organizations and schools use surveys to take the pulse of their constituencies, evaluate products and services, and plan.
Now there’s a tool for people who want to create surveys.
Survey Pro, a $195 program from Santa Clara-based Apian Software, (800) 237-4565, is an easy-to-use program that allows you to design, print and analyze a questionnaire. It requires an IBM-compatible PC and a Hewlett-Packard-compatible laser printer.
The program has three phases. First you design and print the questionnaire. After the survey forms are filled out, you use the program to enter the responses. Finally, you perform an analysis and print a report.
The program allows you to create open-ended questions or select from several optional scales that measure levels of agreement, excellence and importance. The scales, along with the appropriate questions, can be used to evaluate products or help rank new programs or services by priority. There are also scales that allow people to enter numbers, dollars or percentages.
Once you’ve created a draft of a questionnaire, you can dress it up with headlines and different type styles.
There are no drawing tools, but you can import a logo or scanned photograph (TIF or PCX file) created with another program. Survey Pro comes with a variety of attractive laser printer fonts (type styles) that are automatically loaded into your printer’s memory. I got excellent results with the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III and the Everex LaserScript LX.
Once the questionnaires have been filled out, you use the program to enter the data. The data entry screen is the same as the one you created for the printed questionnaire. The program allows you to enter data from up to 2,000 respondents.
That’s more than most professional research firms use for national public opinion polls.
After the data is entered, the program can print various reports. These range from simple tables showing frequency of responses to sophisticated cross-tabulations that allow you to compare how responses to one question correlate with responses to others.
This technique allows you to sort your data by respondents’ sex, age, income or any other criterion. The program also prints charts and graphs that can be used in printed reports or stand-up presentations.
Survey Pro reports total responses and averages, but it doesn’t offer the sophisticated statistical reports needed by some professional researchers. It does, however, allow you to export the data to a standard format that can be imported into other programs.
This will let you analyze the data using a spreadsheet, database or statistical package. Because of that feature, the program is used by some professional survey consultants, says Apian President Bill Ray.
The program is an excellent tool for getting customer or member feedback, but it’s not necessarily suited for the more subtle questions sometimes used in attitudinal surveys. Although it makes the questionnaires more attractive and helps you select balanced response scales, it can’t help with wording questions.
Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the authors cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Lawrence J. Magid, P.O. Box 620477, Woodside, Calif. 94062, or contact the L. Magid account on the MCI electronic mail system.
