Question for the science minded. The best way to do an online survey, for research?

[joe]

Let's say you wanted to do some research, a scientific study without access to a lab or money to pay volunteers. How would you handle setting up an online survey that remains scientific? I need a way to up the chances my respondents would be honest (obviously it will be self-reporting). And also the wording of the questions will be very important.

[KevinNYC]

Let's say you wanted to do some research, a scientific study without access to a lab or money to pay volunteers. How would you handle setting up an online survey that remains scientific? I need a way to up the chances my respondents would be honest (obviously it will be self-reporting). And also the wording of the questions will be very important.

The tools for it are easy
https://www.surveymonkey.com/

Getting an accurate sample and writing competent questions and knowing what to do with the data is much more difficult.


http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/education/polling_fundamentals_intro.html

[KevinNYC]

Let's say you wanted to do some research, a scientific study without access to a lab or money to pay volunteers. How would you handle setting up an online survey that remains scientific? I need a way to up the chances my respondents would be honest (obviously it will be self-reporting). And also the wording of the questions will be very important.

Are you doing this for your own curiosity?

[miller-time]

https://www.surveymonkey.com/

I think that is the one I used when I was doing my psych degree. I'm not sure if the free version would be robust enough, but it does work well for a simple survey. In terms of getting volunteers you can probably just ask people you know, although depending on what you are testing you should be cautious of creating a sampling bias and you probably want to have a decent number of people too.

[joe]

Yeah, I am aware of creating bias with the way you construct your questions. It is something I will give thought to as I write them out. Thank you for the links, I am going to check those out.

Kevin, it is for my curiosity and I want to write something on the topic. I had a friend describe to me the interesting way that he naturally responds to marijuana, which was pretty much the exact opposite of how I respond to it (when I smoked). I was curious which of our experiences is more standard, or if it was varied across the board.