Adding Your Survey

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The first step in using phpQuestionnaire is creating a survey. To do this, you must click on the the Survey Editor tab from the Main page:

Survey Editor

The Survey Editor interface is broken down into three parts:

  • Choose a Survey 
    Use the Select Survey drop down menu in this portion of the Survey Editor to access a previously created Survey.
  • Add/Modify a Survey 
    ​Users will use this portion of the interface either to:
    • Create a Survey: We shall review this below.
    • Modify a Survey: When you wish to modify a survey, you will use this portion of the interface to do so.
  • Import a Survey 
    Allows you to import a previously created phpQuestionnaire survey.

Now that you have become familiar with the overall interface, let’s add a new survey to phpQuestionnaire.

Add/Modify a Survey

As stated above, this is the portion of the Survey Editor interface where you will add a new survey to the system.

Note: phpQuestionnaire provides two interfaces for Survey addition: Basic and Advanced. The Basic interface is strongly recommended for Survey addition; it gives you the quickest access to the most important details of survey creation.

The Advanced interface not only allows you to stylize certain aspects of your survey, but it also allows you control distribution and publicity of your survey’s results. For more information about this please contact either Dale David or Debbie Faires.

For this tutorial, we shall use the Basic interface (highlighted in red in the top-right portion of the image below).

Add/Modify a Survey Fields 
The following information should be entered into the Add/Modify a Survey fields:

  • Interface: Basic.
  • Survey Name: Create a name for your survey (in this example, we have chosen LIBR 200 Survey as the our Survey name).
  • Survey Template: Make sure that phpQ Default Template is selected
  • User Restrictions: These can be used to attempt to limit the number of submissions to one per user per survey. They are also effective in stopping accidental duplicate submissions and validating the user’s e-mail address. They aren’t, however, 100% effective and a determined user will still be able to make multiple survey submissions. You are allowed to select any of the following three options. Selecting none of them will allow any user to submit the survey as many times as they wish. You can select multiple restrictions to enforce multiple rules.

    The available user restrictions are:
    • Unique IP Address 
      You can use a user’s IP address as one method of blocking multiple survey submissions from the same computer. This is not a 100% guaranteed method and it can be fooled. In some cases, it may deny a legitimate user the ability to complete the survey if two different users are on the same IP address, and in other cases a user could simply change computers to submit the survey twice. In any case, it does provide protection against accidental duplicate submissions or someone who is not intent on submitting the survey more than once.
    • Cookies 
      Using these restriction, phpQ will attempt to place a cookie in the user’s browser each time they complete a survey. If phpQ detects they have already completed the survey, they will not be allowed to make another submission. Using this restrictions requires them to have a cookie-capable browser to complete the survey as it also checks to make sure they don’t have cookies turned off. This is not 100% protection and the program can still be fooled into taking multiple survey submissions from the same user.
    • Verified Email 
      This is by far the most effective restriction. It requires that every person who completes the survey also supply an e-mail address which they are then forced to validate. It is still not 100% effective and cannot guard against users who have multiple e-mail addresses and wish to submit several surveys, but it does provide you with a working e-mail address with which you can contact survey respondents.
      For this example in survey creation, we shall implement the Verified Email restriction.
  • Description: This field contains text that will be displayed on the Main page which lists all surveys. It is only there if you wish to provide a brief summary of the purpose or contents of this survey.

Click the Add Survey button

Once you have filled in all the fields listed above, click the Add Survey button.

Upon clicking the Add Survey button, your newly created survey will appear at the top in the Choose a Survey portion of the Survey Editor interface.

Please note the following:

  • In the Select Survey drop down menu, your survey’s name will appear with the creation date appended to it.
  • By default, all surveys are Not Active until you are ready to activate it. For more information, see the tutorial called Activate/Deactivate Survey.

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