News & Updates

Hamilton Survey Tools

By Nikki Reynolds

August 26, 2014

Do you need to survey your students? Do you need to survey faculty, staff or the entire student body? Do you need to have your students create surveys for a course assignment? Hamilton College LITS offers four (yes, 4) different tools to meet your various needs.

First, of course, remember that surveys are subject to some "acceptable use" policies, and should be reviewed by faculty, staff, the Institutional Research Office, and possibly the IRB and not sent out willy, nilly. Respondents have some rights, which need to be protected. Saying that a survey is anonymous is not necessarily enough.

So, once you are sure what you are doing follows appropriate guidelines for either managerial or research surveys, you can choose one of the following tools.

• The Hamilton Survey Tool is available to faculty, students, and staff. The tool is available at http://my.hamilton.edu/survey-manager. This tool is particularly appropriate for brief surveys where you are willing to do your analysis largely through Excel by downloading a spreadsheet of the data.
• Google Forms, is also available to all through your Google Apps for Education (HillConnect) account. This tool is similar to the Hamilton Survey Tool, in that it produces a spreadsheet of data that you can analyze using the standard spreadsheet tools. You can also download the results as an Excel spreadsheet if you'd rather work in that environment.
• The College also maintains a license for the Qualtrics Research Suite. This tool is available at http://hamilton.qualtrics.com (yes, it ends in ".com", not ".edu"). You will be asked to log into a Hamilton branded login page. Use your network/email ID and your network password, just as you would for the Hamilton Survey Tool or Google Forms. Qualtrics is a robust but amazingly straight-forward survey tool that allows you to see some initial statistical analysis of your data right in the Qualtrics survey site. You can also download the data in Excel or SPSS format for further analysis if you wish.
• Finally, surveys in Blackboard are a good choice is just going to the students in a class. Procedures to create surveys outlined in the Blackboard manual.

Note that any of the tools allow you to use a simple web URL to distribute the survey. This can be handy when you are having a room full of people respond to a survey, as sometimes is asked at the end of a presentation. You can also limit access through the use of a login of some kind for all tools.