Online Surveys Made Easy with LimeSurvey
by Andy Tseng
Written in PHP and deployed with a MySQL as the backend database, LimeSurvey is an open-source, user-friendly, feature-rich web application that enables users to develop and publish surveys and gather responses without any programming knowledge.
As you can imagine Researchers, especially those in social sciences, do a lot of surveying, and there are many online survey tools made available. Here @ITS_Res we are recommending a tool named LimeSurvey because of these three points:
- cool features and benefits:
- it’s a mature open source project and thus no licensing fees
- has a large user community for support
- self-managed user account
- you can generate & run multiple surveys within one user account
- the survey templates & questions are reusable
- it supports complex conditions between questions
- LimeSurvey is University supported and backed up on University servers (also meeting ethics council approval). Please be aware that if you use a tool like SurveyMonkey the servers are based in the USA and you might be violating the privacy of your survey patients - eek!, and
- we are building up a community of practice where you can learn the survey technique
As per the third point we already have some amazing researchers working with the tool:
Satu Alakangas (Liaison Librarian from FBE) is helping build up the community and (most importantly) methodologies for doing qualitative and quantitative surveys using LimeSurvey.
Bernard Meade also runs surveys with LimeSurvey to find out how to improve on the already popular 3D Printing Showcase held recently in the University.
If you’d like to know more about LimeSurvey, please contact Andy Tseng at ITS Research.
