SoGoSurvey, solving our problems with online surveys !

Collecting data, one of the central issues for many academic works. When it comes to research, to have a well done data-set sometimes is more than half the work needed to have nice results.

Luckily, the internet really helps when comes to surveys. The time demanding struggle of handling questions one person at a time is something of the past, for the majority of cases.

Google forms is a very usual approach and most of the time is the first thing that comes in mind when the necessity to create a survey emerges. For simple cases it really does the job, neat and clean. But when you need to add a little bit of complexity to your research Google forms starts to show its limitations.

For my particular case, I needed the classification of hundreds of microscopy pictures, done by several experts on the field. To ask each one of them if they could please classify in three categories the 300 jpg files that are attached on an email is out of question, nobody would do that.

I could use Google forms to create the 300 questions (with the images), but then comes some statistical problems: First, no one would pay attention to all the 300 questions, maybe the first 10 if I was luck. Second, the sequence of the images could bias the results. The answer is simple, just  show the questions in a randomized order, and then with a nice number of answers I could get some statistical results for all of the data-set. But guess what ? It is impossible to randomize questions on Google forms.

Then I started a odyssey to find another platform that would do the job. There are lots survey systems available on the internet, and the majority of them could solve my problem. But to get the tools I needed (images on questions and randomization) there is always the need for the "pro" version of the services.

When I was almost giving up, and thinking about learning HTML and PHP to create my own survey system, I've found SoGoSurvey (http://www.sogosurvey.com/). It simply has all the features that I needed, with a really nice interface ! SoGoSurvey also uses the same "pro" mechanism as the majority of the other plataforms, but the prices are really apealing. And it comes with a special bonus: It is possible to ask for a one year free student registration.

I guess I just need to thank the SoGoSurvey team for saving my thesis ;)