Survey Processing

ITS supports two types of survey forms: the general purpose questionaire and the general purpose answer sheet. ITS does not prepare your survey forms. We will help you to make sure that your forms are scannable, i.e. we will review sample copies of your forms. If you require help in actually duplicating your forms, Creative Communications is able to help lay out as well as duplicate the forms. It is advisable to keep in contact with us throughout the process because forms that have stray marks or text in certain areas of the bubble sheet (form) itself can make it impossible to physically scan the forms making it necessary for your department to hand enter the data. If you have a question please do not hesitate to call Academic Computing in ITS. You may reach us through the solution center at 523-1511.

The General Purpose Questionaire

This scan form allows up to 6 responses per question. The number of questions is limited to 48. The form allows the questions themselves to be printed on the form along with some introductory text.

This type of survey sheet is appropriate for surveys that will be mailed out or for those surveys that will have less than 49 questions. If you require up to 7 responses, you must use the second type of scan form.

In the event that you require the person to bubble more than one answer per question, you must contact ITS to receive specialized instructions.

NOTE: This form is being phased out and is being replaced by a jade colored form that is very similar.

General Purpose Answer Sheet

This scan form allows up to 200 questions with up to seven responses per question. There is also an introductory section that may be used to record name, ID number and class information. This type of form is normally used for tests at NAU. There is no provision for printing the questions themselves on this form.

When using this form it is necessary to provide a booklet with the directions and questions. This allows the surveyers to have a limited number of booklets and still survey a large number of individuals.

General Procedures

Your first step in preparing a survey is to design the questionaire itself. If you will be using our forms, select the appropriate one based on the number of questions you will be asking. For all questions that require a scale (i.e. How do you feel about this?) it is advisable to make the most favorable response the highest number. For eample:

Circle the number of your choice where 1 is the worst
5 is the best.

How would you rate this seminar?         1 2 3 4 5

Once you have designed your questionaire, it may be a good idea to contact Academic Computing and have your survey looked over. This will help assure that the scanning process goes as smoothely as possible.

Next is laying out the form so that the students/respondents have the best chance possible of answering the questions on the line you intended. ITS suggests that you number the bubble area next to the bubbles just to the left of the bubbles. The statistical programs being used to analyze the data require specific data to be in specific columns.

Once you have had your survey instrument checked and duplicated you will administer the instrument as you see fit. After you have collected the forms you will box them and bring them to ITS for processing. If you intend to have summary information done on groups of respondents you will need to use one of the auxiliary bubble areas on your form to indicate section/group. You may call ITS for information on how to do this.

If you intend for ITS to supply you with statistical output, each different survey must be checked in at the ITS main desk and must be accompanied by a memo and a blank copy of your survey form(s). The memo must state the nature of the survey, the contact person's name, phone number and email address and must also include a concise list of the statistics that are required. If you have a small number of groups and have not bubbled anything for group you must separate the groups manually and bring them to ITS with a memo for each bundled group. An ITS survey tracking form must be filled out for each group of surveys.

If you do not need statistical output from ITS you may simply take your forms to room 102 of the ITS building, fill out a scan request form (make sure to check the box "copy file on diskette"), and leave the form and bubble forms in the appropriate bin. You must also supply a diskette for the scanned data. You will be called when it is ready to be picked up.

Statistical Output

ITS will supply you with the data from your survey if so requested. You must supply us with a blank windows formatted diskette for this purpose. ITS can also supply statistical output from your scan. Currently ITS only supplies frequency tabulations and general descriptive statistics including, mean, mode, standard deviation, sums and counts. This can be supplied by subgroup if so requested. As mentioned previously you must have a memo with each survey. On this memo you should succintly indicate the types of statistics you require. Please refrain from including any extraneous information in your memo so that your requirements are perfectly clear.

For example here is a sample memo:

TO: ITS
FROM: Jane Doe, Wazoo Dept, 523-5555
SUBJ: Wazoo Peach Pitters survey

Here is the peach pitters survey that we contacted you about. We would like frequency tabulations for questions 1 thru 10 and descriptive statistics for questions 8 thru 25. Attached is a sample of the survey instrument.

We will use your sample survey instrument to set up the statistical run. Typically we will look at your response codes and will set everything except valid responses as missing. For example on our jade form which has 6 bubbles per question, if you have a gender question and indicate to bubble 1 for male and 2 for female, values 3 thru 6 would be set as missing (system known invalid response). Missing values are not included in the statistical calculations.