Advice

I would recommend using an online survey from www.kwiksurveys.com. It was free to sign up. Unlike SurveyMonkey it allows you to create an unlimited number of questions and it will download your results right into Excel. It made my life a lot easier. It also worked well to randomly choose K classes and email the entire class alias.

For your survey, put more involved questions later in the survey, so if people stop answering it, you still get most of your data. Also, including “other” with fill in the blank is a waste of time for numeric data because you won’t be able to use it in analysis.

Definitely work with a partner and divide up the work because it can be time consuming. It goes faster if you pick something in which you’re actually interested or that can be of real-world help to someone.

Finally, although I’m sure many other people will say it, make sure to get lots of numeric data. Qualitative data is interesting, but for most the analysis you’ll have to do, numeric is what you need. You can always ask range questions, such as “no interest, some interest…a lot of interest”, on a 1 to 5 scale, which will create numeric data for that kind of question.