Online Surveys and Social Network Analysis

I've been deep into survey administration the last couple months. For more about the project history, see my previous posts on Six Sigma Church, which we now officially call Renewing Our Calling.



Our project included a major survey which we made available on paper and online for the whole congregation (roughly 400-500 people). We just finished collecting responses and were happy to get 167 of them. You can try a dummy version of survey right here.



We used SurveyMonkey to support the online survey. This is an amazingly powerful service and it's cheap, too. In many situations you can use it for free. We needed the "professional" version which is still a steal at $20 per month.



My experience with SurveyMonkey wasn't all good. We originally formatted our survey into multiple columns per screen, but found that SurveyMonkey has a bad habit of randomly skipping questions presented in this way. Thankfully we paid close attention to survey responses as they came in, so we didn't lose much data. However, my experience with SurveyMonkey tech support was decidedly mixed. They responded quickly to my initial complaint but then did a poor job of following up and they never actually acknowledged that there is a data integrity problem with multi-column surveys in their system, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (Some of our anonymous survey respondents actually wrote helpful debugging comments in their responses, as they struggled to make sense of questions garbled by SurveyMonkey; and my personal experience doing data entry confirmed their remarks.)



Many of my readers are probably especially interested in administering social network analysis surveys. To help you along, I recommend two resources. First, check out The Hidden Power of Social Networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, which includes a sample survey form in an appendix. Then, read "Ethical and Strategic Issues in Organizational Social Network Analysis," by Steve Borgatti and Jose Luis Molina, who explain the delicacy of administering a social network survey, which by its very nature lacks the safeguard of anonymity we usually expect.



Based on these two resources, here is a generic social network survey I have written, which you may find helpful.



And finally, go take this survey, commissioned by the National Research Council to "study the possibility of identifying 'Network Science' as a cross-disciplinary area of research worthy of enhanced attention and funding."