1. To use this program for first time, try the following example. First give
the survey a name and a one-word short name. Type these names, My First
Survey, and survey1 in the first row of the table. The survey's long
name will be placed in the title bar and as a title on the page. The short name
will be entered as a hidden variable in the survey as the first variable (which
is also called 00exp).
2. Now push the button in the second row marked 1. Start Form. This
will insert the starting HTML tags and also put in the hidden variables,
including exp, date, time, and Remote Address (IP). (The remote address will
help you identify multiple submissions from the same person. Multiple
submissions usually occur within a few minutes of each other, when the person
uses the back button to go back and recheck his or her answers or add a comment,
then the person clicks the submit button again.)
3. Now, type in the text of your first question, being careful to type over
the line inviting you to type in the first question. This text will be printed
in the form when you press one of the buttons in the next row.
First, enter a question with a text box answer:
1. How much do you weigh in pounds?
Now, push the
button marked 3a. Text Input. This will look as follows:
To create this question with its scale of radio buttons, type in the question
(you do not enter the question number), then type in the number of buttons you
want, and also type in the labels for the ends of the scale. The default
settings are for 5 buttons, labeled from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
When you are ready, push the 3b. Radio Button Scale button.
You can repeat step 3 up to 90 times, and you can intermix text input boxes
and radio buttons. (If you are using the default script, you are limited to a
total of 100 variables in a given form, including the hidden variables).
4. If you would like to add demographic questions of sex, age, education, and
nationality, push the button marked 3c. Demographics. You can, of course,
add your own items to obtain other demographic variables such as religion,
income, ethnicity, or whatever. You can add the demographics at any place in the
survey, before, in the middle, or after the other items created in step 3.
5. When you have added all the items you want, push the button marked 4.
Finish the form. This button will add the finishing HTML to complete the
form.
If you use Netscape Navigator, you can now push the 5. Display button
to view the form in the browser. You can edit in the window directly, and use
the Display button to view the effects of your editing. If you have Internet
Explorer 4 for Mac, you will need to save the HTML before you can view it (see
steps 6 and 7). (The Display button does not work in Internet Explorer 4
for Mac, but does work with IE 4.5 for Mac and with IE 4 for Windows.)
6. You can now replace the words "(put your instructions here)" with your
instructions. Copy and paste the HTML from the window to a text editor such as
NotePad, SimpleText, BBEdit, etc. Save it as text only, with an extension of
.htm or .html. For example, you could name it survey1.htm. It is recommended that you AVOID using an advanced TEXT PROCESSOR
(such as MS Word) for this stage, as HTML-aware processors may change your HTML
in unintended ways! (AFTER you have saved it as plain vanilla text, you
may want to load it into such a processor to refine its appearance, to add
graphs or images, if you know what you're doing).
7. Load the file in your browser, test it, and edit its appearance in the
text editor to suit your taste. If you plan to have people type short sentences
as answers, instead of numerical answers, you should increase the SIZE=8
MAXLENGTH=20 to some larger values; for example, you might use SIZE=60
MAXLENGTH=100 for a brief text answer.
You may want to change the ACTION=URL to specify
ACTION=mailto:username@address.edu, where username@address.edu is your email
address. Or you may wish to change the ACTION=URL to the URL of your own CGI
script.
A script in PERL by William Schmidt that works with surveyWiz can be used to
save data to your local server. To see the script and instructions, click
here. This page also contains a PERL script to randomly assign people to
different conditions.
The default value of the ACTION address will send the data to a file named,
data.csv. To download this file, you can FTP read only from the following
address:
FTP://guest:guest99@psych.fullerton.edu
which you can type
in the location box of your Netscape Navigator or IE browser. Note that this is
FTP site. At the present time, password is guest99, as shown above, and permits
download only.
8. All files are copyright Michael H. Birnbaum. You are welcome to use the
default option under the following conditions. You may freely use the data
generated from your own experiment without requesting permission; however,
you may not use data from another person's experiment without permission
from the author of that experiment, nor may you make any other use of the
program or data that would be considered unethical according to the APA code of ethics.
9. Check the data file to make sure that you understand how the variables are
placed in the file. One method to identify text boxes is to take the test and
give short answers that will identify the item (for example, respond
item1 to the first item, item2 to the second, etc.). The variables
will be in the order that the items are entered in surveyWiz. The question
number, however, does not match the variable number, due to the hidden
variables. The first question you add will be the fifth variable in the file,
after the four hidden variables of survey name (00exp), date, time, and remote
address. If you rearrange the order of the items after creating the HTML, then
the data will still return in the original order. You can use this property to
create several different random orders of questions, if required in your
research topic. All of these rearranged files will return the variables in the
original order of the questions. (They are placed in the order of the leading
digits on the variable names, specified in the INPUT statements.) To view a
sample JavaScript page to assign people to different conditions of orders, click
here; to try it out in your browser, click
here.
Click here to start FTP
session: Download data.csv
Copyright Michael H. Birnbaum, 1998, all rights reserved. This program may
be used freely for educational and other noncommercial scholarly uses. You may
copy and modify this program, as long as you copy this copyright notice. If
you do use it, please cite the URL and the article by Birnbaum (2000) in works
that benefitted from its use. Software is "as is," no guarantees or warranties
can be made.
Reference
Birnbaum, M. H. (2000). SurveyWiz and FactorWiz: JavaScript Web
pages that make HTML forms for research on the Internet. Behavior Research
Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 32, 339-346.
This
material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under
Grants SBR-9410572, SES-9986436, and BCS-0129453. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.
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July 6, 1999