In article <[log in to unmask]>, David Dawson
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Is any museum-ler using specialist software to undertake visitor surveys
>(ie not standard spreadsheets)
>
>Would be grateful for any experiences out there.

You have to be clear whether the point of using a software package is
primarily to ease data capture or to do the subsequent analysis.

I looked at some survey software packages for a survey of archives in UK
universities we did last year (the report is available at
http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/JISC/Survey1.htm).

Some packages are
*       "inQuest" <http://www.inquest.co.uk/>
*       "Soft Survey" <http://www.softsurvey.com>
*       "?Quest ?Questionnaire" <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
*       "Question Mark Designer for Windows"

I didn't find any package that could handle all of the types of question
we needed to ask, such as filling in a two-dimensional table, allocating
percentages to several items in a list, or combining pre-set answers
with additional ones typed in by respondents under the heading "Other
(specify)".

It would have been possible to construct a computer form to collect this
information, but the point of most of the packages is that they also do
the analysis, and they didn't give us the flexibility which we obtained
by having the data in a spreadsheet so that we could generate many
different tables and figures. The survey was conducted by post, so we
had to produce tidy questionnaires on paper - I don't think that many of
the respondents would have preferred to fill in forms on a screen,
because they often had to go away and find information before they could
complete it.

I didn't look in detail at the heavyweight analysis packages such as
SPSS or SAS, because they would have been overkill for our needs: they
might be worth considering if you were doing a lot of survey work.

Leonard Will
--
Willpower Information       (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants                 Tel: +44 181 372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex, EN2 7BQ, UK    Fax: +44 181 372 0094
[log in to unmask]           [log in to unmask]
--------------- <URL: http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/> ---------------