RUNNING A SURVEY OVER THE WEB
As evidenced in part by the reference list on the first page, there are many ways to make the Web pages needed for running a survey over the Web. Many programs can be used to construct the Web pages, and several methods have been proposed for collecting the data from the survey. The material below focuses specifically on only one method--Active Server Pages as built into FrontPage 2000--but the concepts could be applied to other methods. (It focuses just on that one method because that is the easiest as currently available to students at UNL.)
A note to UNL students: If you are planning to run a survey over the Web, the easiest way is to use your own office computer for data collection. So far, we have not got the method described below to work with the NT Server in Burnett. Thus, if you have a computer and can install PWS and FP2000 on it, then continue reading below. If not, return to the main page and proceed through Section Five, "Web pages to make web pages." That section will describe how to make the processing forms necessary to send data from the Web pages to an Access 2000 (which you will need) database.
Another section covers the introduction to making Web pages using FP2000. Only three pages are needed for a survey:
Once these pages are constructed, you must make sure that the page containing the survey questions is saved with an ".asp" extension, such as "survey.asp." Then....
SENDING DATA TO THE DATABASE
With FrontPage 2000, sending survey data to your database is very easy. You do not have a database yet, but that is fine because FP2000 creates one for you. When your survey form is complete, right-click within the dotted lines of the form. Choose "Form Properties." In the window that appears, select "Send to database". Then click on the "Options" button. Click on "Create Database." FP2000 will then create a database and the connection that it needs to write to that database. The database will be located in the folder named "fpdb" on your web and you will be told the name that FP2000 gives to it. Further, in addition to the variables from your survey form, for each participant FP2000 will save the date and time that the participant arrived, the browser that the participant was using, and information about the participant's computer. You can see this by clicking on the "Additional Fields" tab in the Options window. Finally, if your survey is currently saved on a disk-based web (i.e., not on the web server), you will have to repeat the above process and create the database and the connection on the web server after you have published your web pages.
And that is all that needs to be done to send data to the database. If you change the survey form and add or delete variables, just return to the Options window and choose "Update Database." You will not lose any data if you do this.
In the Options window, you can also specify the address of a confirmation page. After each participant completes the survey, he or she will be directed to this page. If you do not specify anything in this line, participants will receive a confirmation page that just lists the data that they submitted (very ugly). As suggested above, you need a web page that contains a thank-you and some debriefing information, and possibly some links to further information. Then type in that page's name in the Confirmation Page field.
Finally, when you open the database, you will note that all variables are saved as text strings. You can change these to integers either before or after your data has been collected by going to the Design View of your database in Access and changing the "data type" to "number."
A PROBLEM ENCOUNTERED
I'm not sure what causes this problem, but you may get an error message when you hit the Options button and FP2000 tries to connect to the database that says "The server encountered an error while processing a database request." If you click the Details button, it will read "Server error: Unable to retrieve the list of record sources from a database using the connection string" and then give you some error text from the database driver. To read more about what causes this error, click here. To fix the error, download Microsoft Data Access Components 2.1 (MDAC 2.1) from here, and then install it on the server.
Furthermore, if not installed correctly, FP2000 and PWS can be very touchy. Specifically, it seems to only allow one survey, database and database connection for each subweb on your server. The above error also is given when more than one database connection is present within a subweb.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE SURVEY'S CONSENT FORM
The only remaining task is to decide whether you want to present the consent form and the survey separately or together. That is, whether you want them to be on the same web page or not. If you want to present them separately (different pages), make the consent form into a separate web page. Then, you have to add a link at the bottom that will direct the participant to the survey. To do so, go into HTML view and add the following code at the bottom of the page, just above the </body> tag:
| <p><a href="survey.asp">Click here to continue</a> </p> |
Substitute the name of the page with your survey for survey.asp . This will add a hyperlink at the bottom of the page. You can also do this by positioning your cursor at the bottom and hitting CTRL-K. You can adjust the formatting (size, color) of the link as you wish.
If you instead want the consent form and the survey to be together, just copy and paste the consent form into the top of the page that you already made and save.
So, now you have your two or three web pages. Remember, if you have created these files as disk-based files, you will have to copy them and the database and its folder from that location onto the web server. If you created these as server-based files, that is already done for you, and you are ready to go. Test your survey extensively before soliciting participants.
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