Managing surveys: ten lessons learned from web-surveys

Abstract

The paper reviews ten lessons learned from twenty years of managing a continuous, volunteer, multilingual, multi-country web-survey and several face-to-face surveys derived from the web-survey. The lessons address defining web-surveys, software package versus own software, non-response, monitoring questionnaire intake, API’s versus showcards, reading versus verbal communication, I versus you phrasing, generic versus personalised survey questions, counting survey questions versus characters read, and managing a multi-country, multilingual survey.