Qualtrics Blog

There are various forms of logic available within the Qualtrics tool, each with its own unique functionality. Sometimes one form of logic is better suited to a task than another, and understanding the functionality of the different types of logic is key to knowing which one to use in a particular scenario.

Skip Logic, Branch Logic (Survey Flow), and Display Logic are the different types of logic available for use. Today we will focus on Display Logic. Display Logic is set up on an individual question and, as the name implies, can be used to only display that particular question depending on the logic specified.

Display Logic is different from Skip Logic in that the survey taker is not being sent to a particular area of the survey, but is merely being displayed or not displayed a particular question depending on a previous question or embedded data information you might already have about them.

This brings me to the next aspect of Display Logic. It is essentially Branch Logic (Survey Flow) on a smaller scale (individual question) and can be set up to work off of a question response, embedded data, and even a quota. It can calculate multiple lines of logic using the AND and OR operators.

With the next survey you create, check out the Display Logic feature when designing your survey. When editing your question you will find it in the advanced options button (the purple button) to the left of the question.

One of the chief competencies of an effective market researcher is to identify groups within a population that may be more likely to purchase the researcher's firm's products.  If groups are defined well enough, targeted marketing materials can lead to huge ROI.  In practice, this process is referred to as clustering.

The basic approach goes like this:

1. Survey- The survey should be designed to provide multiple measures of propensity to purchase and preferences for the product. The survey should be administered to the population of interest and the sample size should be large enough to make statistically sound conclusions.

2. Analysis- Before the cluster analysis is performed, it is best to do a factor analysis on the survey to minimize the factors we cluster with. If several questions are found to measure the same thing, we should combine these before the cluster analysis is done. This analysis can all be done in SPSS. After the data reduction, do a cluster analysis and decide how many clusters are appropriate and save the cluster assignments. Now you can view the means of all the factors across the clusters.

3. Action-Naming the clusters helps companies target the clusters correct. Look for differences in the means of factors and name the clusters based on these differences. These differences are used to design your marketing strategies to ensure that the right customers are approached with the right product in the right way.

A vital part of making decisions in any aspect of life is gathering information. But also important is organizing that information in such a way that you can compare it, track its progress and determine trends.  An excellent way to tackle all these dilemmas is by having a dynamic Dashboard that allows you to visually examine the data.  The best way to get a lot out of data in a short period time is through looking at charts and graphs.  It is a lot easier for the eye to differ between metrics when they are displayed as charts rather than with lists and lists of numbers.

Qualtrics, an online survey software company, has provided dozens of clients, both big and small, with custom, eye-catching dashboards that allow those within the company to quickly and accurately examine data pertinent to their operations so that they can make crucial business decisions with precision and confidence.  A neat thing about these dashboards is that they tailor them to  the needs of the company.  They're quick to return a top-notch product back to the company, but by no means is it something that is thrown together.  No organization produces better looking or more statistically sound dashboards than Qualtrics.  They incorporate drill-downs that allow the company to narrow your data to certain demographics or scenarios, or see how products have performed over the last year.  If you need to examine data to influence your business decisions, look no further than the custom Dashboards made by Qualtrics.

Business-to-business surveying is a hot market right now.  Especially with the economic slowdown of the last few months, it is becoming imperative for businesses to understand the needs of their customers.  In traditional customer/producer markets, it is relatively simple to identify the end users for a product.  In a business-to-business context, it sometimes becomes difficult to directly contact customers… (we all know how hard it is to get feedback from customers sometimes.)  However, their are some exceptional features within the Qualtrics Survey Software tool that allow for a better survey experience for your business end users.

Mobile Devices

It seems like everyone carries a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other similar device.  As we are becoming a more mobile society, many business people in particular are gravitating to devices that allow for productivity on the go.  The Qualtrics system has the capacity to display surveys on BlackBerry devices, iPhones and other web-enabled devices.

Matrix questions can make a survey much quicker for respondents.  Combining several questions into one streamlines the answering process, so that they respondents can quickly read through and answer  several questions very quickly.

However, there is also a risk that respondents will cruise through all of the questions  answering “very satisfied” to  all of the questions without giving any thought to what is being asked.  This is called Straight lining.  Straight lining also makes it hard to tell if someone genuinely felt “very satisfied” for each question asked or if they just answer the same thing to get through the survey quicker.

You can avoid  straight lining by  asking the questions from a positive and a negative perspective.  For example with an agree disagree scale instead of asking  “provided good entertainment”  you might rephrase it to say  “did not provide good entertainment.”   Changing back and forth from positive to negative makes it so that they respondent needs to think more  about what is being asked and can’t just cruise through the matrix question.

Keyboard shortcuts allow a user to easily navigate around almost any computer program, including web-based applications. Two of the many shortcuts in the Qualtrics system that will enable ease of use are the 'Control+S' and 'Shift+Click.' While editing a survey, the Qualtrics tool will auto-save any changes a user makes when selecting a new question or by clicking on any of the tabs or other functions on a page. If a user would like to increase their peace of mind, they may manually save their work whenever they like by clicking on the 'S' button while holding down the 'Control' key. This will save any changes they have made in the Edit Survey tab.

Users will often request that in the reports section, an easy way be added to either select or deselect all questions in the question list on the left of the page. By clicking on one of the radio buttons in the list while holding down the 'Shift' button, all of the questions will either appear or disappear in a report. This can allow for quick creations of reports without having to add or remove questions individually.

Qualtrics loves data. It relishes it and hordes it. It tries to gather everything possible. It will record data embedded in the survey URL, it will record data available from the panel, it just can't get enough of data.

However, Qualtrics realizes that no everone shares this affinity for data. Many of our clients have panels that include hundreds of columns of embedded data, which isn't always useful in looking at reports. For this reason Qualtrics does not report all of the data that it gathers unless told to do so.

Any thing that you would like to see in the data must be in the survey flow. If a block is removed from the survey flow, the reports will no longer reflect the data for the questions in that block. Once the block is put back in the survey flow, a place is once again made in the data array, and the data is reported.

This is the same for data not collected through questions. Panel embedded data, or data coming through the URL must have place made for it in the data array by adding it to the survey flow. In other words, Qualtrics needs to be instructed to report this data.

To do so, go to the survey flow, and anywhere your heart desired, add an element. Select Embedded data. Specify the name of the field of data you wish reported, and Qualtrics will begin to report this data.

You can do this at any time, even after the results have been recorded.

Survey data can be very useful in practice, especially when appropriate correlating variables are used at the same time.  For example: many corporations track and report on customer satisfaction data regularly in order to identify market trends.  That is a useful endeavor, but the degree of data utility can be massively enhanced when other data is recorded with the survey response (e.g., things like age, gender, socio-economic status, past purchase behavior).

Qualtrics now includes a web service feature which allows for seamless integration of non-survey-specific data.  This opens up huge avenues in data analysis, where covariates can be used dynamically in analysis of variance-type applications. Data can be integrated in XML, Query String, or JSON formats to fit whatever datasource is available to the researcher.  In practice, each of the values retrieved from the web service are recorded as embedded data elements in the survey response.  The Qualtrics system doesn't limit the number of values that can be stored as embedded data, so the possibilities with this are endless.  Also, as the web service response is stored as embedded data, data fields can be piped into question choices, survey text, and can even be used in branching logic in the survey flow.