Major Elements in the Web Survey

This section will briefly describe the major elements of the Web survey.

3.5.1 Graphics

At this point it is worthwhile to talk about the major elements of the survey: template and settings that have been used throughout the survey. I wanted to use some graphics in the template but I also knew that I have to be careful. Based on the reported literature, advanced graphics may improve the motivation and satisfaction of the respondents, but at the same time it can cause technological limitations such as long downloading time and distraction of the respondents (Vehovar et al., 2002). According to the experimental study conducted by Dillman (2000), respondents are more responsive to the Web surveys with plain graphics. Following these approaches I included plain graphics. By including the name of the school and a logo of the university, I was trying to show the respondents the “legitimacy” and importance of the survey. I used it as a trademark of my survey. The title of the course was included in case some people forgot the name and indicating both numbers of the course was important because it changed once. The created template was automatically applied to every page of the survey.

I also had to make decisions about colors and fonts throughout the survey and followed the rules of trying to stay neutral.

3.5.2 Progress Indicator and Page Navigator

I have included two elements: Page Navigator and Progress Indicator as a part of a template at the bottom of each page of the survey. Progress Indicator plays a key role in helping the respondents to proceed in completing the questionnaire and serves as an orientation in the whole completion process. While placing a progress indicator is a choice of the surveyor, the page navigator is the required element that navigates the respondents through the survey. The Inquisite logo in the bottom right was added automatically by the system.

3.5.3 Length of Questionnaire

The general rule which applies both to paper and Web surveys is that the shorter the questionnaire, the higher the response rate (Vehovar et al., 2002; Dillman, Clark & West, 1994). While converting the paper questionnaire into the Web form, I tried to keep the Web survey short and targeted within the topic of my research and the research questions stated. I also had to be consistent with what I promised to my respondents in terms of the time that they will need to spend to respond. According to my estimates they would have needed 20 minutes on average to respond to 20 questions. I also realized that some of the multiple choice questions will require less time than the open-ended questions.

While I already decided to have the survey divided into several pages as opposed to a questionnaire on one scrolling page (I believe Inquisite would not even allow that), I had to decide how many pages I would have and how much information and how many questions I would include on each page. I also had to use the same approach I used with the paper questionnaire, grouping the questions on the same subtopic in one category and placing them together. The details of my “grouping” decisions along with the screen shots of the pages of the survey are provided in section 3.4.2.1. A copy of the whole survey is provided in Appendix K.

As discussed above, Inquisite survey builder editing capabilities helped me to select different styles and colors to apply to different types of questions. I was able to place 20 questions plus the invitation/consent letter on the first page and the thank you on the last, onto 9 pages. Taking into consideration that almost 50% of my questions were open-ended and they would not take much space with their memo boxes for the responses, it was quite a reasonable number of pages.

FIGURE 5 Time on Average Spent on Thinking Time per Page by the Respondents

Interesting conclusions can be derived from this distribution. While spending 2.5 minutes on getting acquainted with the invitation letter, it took them 0.5 minute to respond to the motivation question in which they had to get acquainted with 4 choices and check all that apply. More than 6 minutes were spent on responding to the questions on page 3. As indicated earlier, I consolidated a few questions in two separate tables, and presumed that this format would be easier to comprehend. Each question had a level of agreement based on Likert scales. I had incorporated quite colorful graphics on that page as well. It looks like all my efforts were not effective in terms of saving time and attracting the respondents. On the other side based on my response rate (see later in section 3.7) they were not disruptive as few respondents abandoned the survey. The major open-ended questions on least and most valuable experiences (P.4) and the career impact question and what is remembered most (P.5) took on average between 3.5 and 4.5 minutes accordingly to respond. While it took only a few seconds for the respondents to click the finish button on the last Thank you page, one of the major problems of the lower response rate at the beginning was that some subjects had the impression that they completed the survey when they clicked on the next button on Page 8, and they never made it to page 9 to click on the finish button which was placed in a page navigator box instead of the next page.

TABLE 3

The Average and Median Time in Seconds Spent on Each Page Views