February 5, 2012

Qualtrics Survey Software

A significant part of the term project, a marketing research conducted for your client, is the design and the administration of a properly designed questionnaire. The days of writing questions in a word processing software are long gone; several powerful tools have become available to fill their place.

Watch the following video about Qualtrics survey software, then follow the instructions in another post to get yourself an account at Qualtrics. Once your account is activated, you will find many more useful, helpful, informative tutorial video programs on different parts of the software. Although there will be a general introduction to using Qualtrics in class, you need to work with it, experience how it works, and become sufficiently comfortable with it before you need to use it for your projects. If you try to learn it when you need to use it, you will find that to be far less efficient and effective in carrying out your responsibilities.

CEO of Qualtrics speaks on the software

Edit Survey Tab

My Surveys Tab in Qualtrics

Are you looking for instructions on how to create your own account on Qualtrics? Here they are.

Qualtrics Account Creation

Providence College has a site license to Qualtrics software. To have access to it, you need to create an account on their site. Follow the instructions below and you will have your account in quick order and be using the learning tools they offer.

  1. Point your browser to the Providence College master account on the Qualtrics site:
    http://www.qualtrics.com/providence
  2. You will see a link to create your account (see below), click on that link and follow the instructions. It is important that you use your Providence College e-mail address to have an account with full access to all the features of Qualtrics
    Qualtrics Sign up screen
  3. Once you log in with your account, visit “Help and Tutorials” menu option at the top of the page. You will find many useful tutorials. I suggest that you start with “Create a Survey and My Surveys” group to get familiar with the software.
  4. Additionally, you will find other types of help, tutorials, helpful documents in the area they call “Qualtrics University”. Explore them all.
  5. Go ahead and create a sample survey with a few questions, try different question types, use available scales, etc.

Remember, you are learning something new which may feel awkward at first, like when you learned how to ride a bike. As you use the software you will learn its working paradigm and become more comfortable with its myriad of features. The idea is not to use them all, but to be able to choose what tools to use. A huge tool box is useless if you are trying to drive a nail to the wall and you cannot find the hammer; worse yet, you do not recognize the hammer!

Have fun (indeed many students find the survey creation part of this course to be fun; believe it, or not!)