Handling Surveymonkey results?

[griffen]

Does anyone have any tips on how to handle Surveymonkey survey results

Comments

[suitablyemoname]

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you. Were you hoping to import them into another program, or did you just want something to work with?

[griffen]

I really just want something I can work with; trying to parse the results as a long row in an Excel spreadsheet is making me crazy (it's over 100 columns long as Surveymonkey assigned one column to each possible response, and most of my non-qualitative questions had six to ten possible responses).

[suitablyemoname]

So your results look like this?

Who Is Your Favourite Monkee Peter Tork Davy Jones Michael Nesmith That Other Guy X X Y X X X Y X Y X X X

That's not as tricky to work with as it seems, but it will require some fancy coding to make it workable within Excel.

[griffen]

Yes, that's what it looks like.

[sarahliz]

You should be able to save a comma delimited file or something similar from excel and then import the results into your favorite stats program. Without more info on how surveymonkey formatted your results I can't really offer you anything more concrete than that.

[suitablyemoname]

Alternatively, if you just wanted the raw data in a readable format, it's possible to do that provided you lean on the CONCATENATE() function.

If readability is the goal, using CONCATENATE() to generate some basic HTML is probably the simplest solution.

[griffen]

What does that do to the data? Could you give me the syntax for using it?

[suitablyemoname]

It joins the cells together.

So if cell A1 contained "Scoobie" and cell A2 contained "doo", CONCATENATE(A1, A2) would return "Scoobiedoo".

You can insert text as well. CONCATENATE(A1, " ", A2) would return "Scoobie doo". (Notice the space.)

[jennifu]

I usually just import the data into SPSS regardless of the presence of open-ended responses. Then I usually copy and paste the open-ended responses into tables that I make in Word. I don't know if it's the most effective strategy, but it is what it is. You just have to take your time and be careful.

[lostcrumpet]

Ditto on this. Or, if you know where the open ended questions will fall you can make the string variable long enough in SPSS.

Considering the ease of creating a survey with them, surveymonkey definitely makes the analyses and cleaning horrendous. It's not a very intuitive system.

[brittdreams]

Thanks for posting this. I'm about to have to do the same thing so I'm keeping an eye on the responses here. Good luck!

[suncatnin]

We just did a survey that was predominately open ended and I found it easier to just get the SM summary page from the website than try to deal with it in Excel. I don't know how many people you're talking about though. We only had about 20 because it was a very small subpopulation. I could print it out, go through and make notations on trends and go from there.

I also didn't need complex computations, so the averages and such that they computed for us did just fine. Then again, we were also catering to a "business" audience (actually a foundation), so any time I put more complex statistics in, they got deleted right back out by the PI.