The CHRR Survey Suite is a group of sophisticated applications developed by CHRR to design, conduct, and analyze small to large, complex surveys. The suite is comprised of the Designer, Translator, Survey, and Investigator applications, which are used by CHRR staff to assist individuals and organizations with their research projects.
The Designer application controls the authoring process and provides additional resources using the Translator application for survey design in multiple languages. The Survey application reads and links the question records produced from the Designer and controls the processes related to data collection in the field. The Investigator application provides access to the collected data.
Designer
Design begins with an understanding of the questionnaire and how you conduct your research. Great care goes into the planning of your objectives, entering your questions, testing, and simulating the questionnaire in the Designer application. Designer allows you to create, design, document, and test survey questionnaires in an efficient, secure manner.
Features include:
- Comprehensive programming suite for designing and documenting survey instruments
- Importing of existing questionnaires from any electronic format or program
- Recording of all questionnaire modifications and updates
- Allows unlimited number of questions and ability to easily move or reorder groups of questions
- Exports questionnaire to the web and creates a link to the survey
- Comprehensive search capabilities, such as question name and word in text
- Provides different types of reports and ability to run diagnostics
- Custom and generic survey themes
- Style formatting of question content, such as fonts and color
- Ability to embed a variety of media: audio, video, and images into survey
- A simulator that creates a mock run of a survey before it goes live
- Debugger tool for identifying programming errors
- Option for visual flow of questionnaire
Translator
Recognizing a need for surveys to be conducted in other languages, CHRR Suite includes translation software for use by translators around the world. The Translator application is a set of tools that manage the survey’s translation process along with the ability to diagnose the status of the translated text , which identifies when new questions are added or when changes have been made to the source-language.
As a component of Designer, Translator provides translation diagnostics and the ability to:
- Translate surveys into any target-language from a source-language
- Add questions
- Generate questionnaire reports in different languages
- Access to translations and reports via the Internet
- View and compare several versions of a translation
- Comment on translations
Survey
While Designer controls the authoring process, Survey displays the questionnaire produced by Designer, and controls the processes related to data collection. The Survey application differs from other interviewing systems in that the data reside on a central server at CHRR, except in cases where Internet access is limited. This means no sensitive data is stored on the computer administering the survey, providing researchers with secure data collection and management capabilities.
Survey features:
- A variety of question types, such as select one, select all, time, date, text, numeric, roster, matrix, function, and more
- A user-friendly interface with progress completion bar
- Ability to conduct interviews
- Collect responses via web
- Customize survey with a logo
- Ability to field when little to no internet connection available (data resides on encrypted laptop)
Investigator
To assist users in accessing data for large data sets, CHRR developed the Investigator application as an online search and retrieval tool. This software allows users to easily peruse the variables present for a given study/project, select variables of interest, and download data.
Investigator provides:
- Web access to search, analyze, view and download data
- Save tagset (list of selected variables) on CHRR server or download locally for later use
- Customize download of data files, to include SAS, SPSS, Stata, and R code
- Downloaded files are ASCII and can be opened with any text editor
- View documentation of the data
- View incoming data as cases complete during the survey fielding
- There are two versions of the Investigator:
- NLS Investigator includes data from the National Longitudinal Surveys
- CHRR Investigator includes data from other CHRR projects