Survey Test
September 18th, 2009One of the great additions this year to the Qualtrics Research Suite is the “Test Survey” option in the Advanced Options menu. This allows you to ask the system to take the survey for you multiple times. This will help sort out any issues you might have with your survey before it is activated.
You can then easily remove these results by navigating to the View Results tab, clicking on “Edit Results,” and selecting it from the Advanced Options menu above your summary table.
When the test is complete, you can examine the results to make sure that they give you the type of output you are looking for. This includes ensuring complex survey logic is performing in the way you want. This is also helpful when experimenting with different question types in your survey. When using a question type for the first time, it is a good idea to run a test to understand how the results will look when it is finished.
It is important to note that the survey tester will not identify errors for you. You need to check the results and make sure that things are functioning properly. For example, if a certain question has significantly more or less responses than you expected, then perhaps there is a logic that you can go and correct. Or maybe you will see in the results that there was an error in coding the values. While it may not be able to find all possible errors for you, the survey tester can be a valuable tool as you test and tweak your survey before launching it to respondents.