Have specific goals

• Identify what you want to get out of the survey.
• Determine population to be surveyed
• Develop meaningful questions that results in the necessary and sufficient data for your study and can be traced back to the anticipated outcome.
• Keep questions concise and to the point.
• Look at studies that collect the same data you are interested in as these may provide a good starting point.
• Determine how you will use and share the survey data, results and reports.

Have a timeline

Things to consider:

• Develop questions/survey
• If necessary, obtain approval of survey study from Institutional Review Board (IRB)
• Create and test the online survey
• Distribute of survey
• Analyse survey results

Individuals, offices, and organizations wishing to conduct a survey of NEOMED students, faculty and staff must submit an initial request for approval to the IR office utilizing this online survey registration form.

Exceptions:

• Surveys/evaluations sent only to persons who have used a given service or office or attended a specific program/event AND for which no invitations are sent to non-users or non-participants.
• Institutional elections (e.g., student groups)

Based on the information submitted via the online survey screening form, some survey requests may be identified as human subjects research. In such cases, the IR office will notify the requester to confer with the IRB for review and approval.

Participants need to be informed if their responses will be anonymous, kept confidential, or are entirely non-confidential.

Anonymous survey data do not include any personal identifiers that would make it possible to associate a response with any given individual.

When survey responses are kept confidential, the IR office will never associate a survey respondent’s name, ID or any other personal information with their individual survey response in any kind of reporting.

When responding to any approved request for survey data, the IR Office will remove all personally identifiable information such as name, location, contact, etc. before the data file is sent to the requestor.

For surveys administered by the IR office, a summary of responses will be provided on an agreed upon date after the survey closes.

In accordance NEOMED policy 3349-03-105 Administration of Surveys, individuals, offices, and organizations wishing to conduct a survey must complete the following screening form.

Access Survey Registration Form

Review will be completed within five working days of request. If students are survey recipients, the IR office will route survey requests to designated reviewer(s) within the colleges for final approval.

• American Association for Public Opinion Research – Best Practices for Survey Research
• Pew Research Center – U.S. Survey Research
• The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education – Best Practices for Survey Research Reports: A Synopsis for Authors and Reviewers