Data analysis and display options with SurveyMonkey

So now you have all your data collected and safely ensconced in the SurveyMonkey or other online survey database. There are several ways to proceed from this point, including simple chart displays generated from the application and downloading the data for more sophisticated analyses.

What can I do from inside the application?

Clearly the simplest way to deal with data collected by an online survey application is to use the application’s own display options. Different applications have different options, but I will use SurveyMonkey as an example.

Charting

SurveyMonkey provides the option to display the responses from each question in chart form. The user can choose the type chart and display options for each item. Chart types include a column chart:

Create Chart page

Create Chart page

(Click image to increase size)

. . . a pie chart

pie chart example

. . . a bar chart

bar chart example

. . . a line chart

Line Chart example

. . . or an area chart

Area Chart example

In addition, there are decision to be made for chart settings, including how respondent choices will be included and how data labels will be displayed, as seen below:

chart options

Some of the display decisions include determining how many of the “choices” (responses) are to be included in the charts, and whether and how omitted choices will be displayed (for example, three response choices are specified, and the remainder are either not displayed, or displayed under a grouping label like “other).
Data label choices

In addition, you may choose whether to show the raw values only, percents only, both values and percents, or to show no only the visual with no associated data. The example below provides both values and percents.

Data label choices

The final choice for all but pie charts is whether to include percents along the axis of the chart or rely on a visual display alone.

Next up: data set downloads

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Online Surveys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Amy Erickson says:
    January 22, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    Another great feature of SurveyMonkey is the ability to filter data. When we ask many staff from many schools to respond to a survey, we’re able to filter the data to create a report for each school. We can also easily aggregate the information to develop a state-wide report.

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