Google Gadget Tracks Relative Frequency of Survey Text Responses
Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 12:02PM Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have posted a link to a brief (one-minute) questionnaire survey; the survey link appears near the top of the left hand column of my blog (or you can click here).
When you answer the questions on the survey and press the “submit” button, the data are transferred to a Google Docs spreadsheet; only the time of the posting is recorded and there is no data captured in the spreadsheet about the individual respondent.
Google makes a series of “gadgets” available that can be used to manipulate and display the data collected via the online form (which you can see here). One gadget is the following display of the relative frequency with which different response text terms in question number 3 (“Which of the following topics interest you?”) are captured by the survey:
I think this is neat.
To see how your own responses affect the display, fill out the questionnaire (the link is here). After you click the “submit” button, the above display should be refreshed.
Can you think of any useful applications for this easy-to-use survey-and-display application? Use the “comment” form below to discuss.
Other Survey Questions
Copyright (c) 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald
Blogging, Google, Metrics, Surveys, Tag Clouds
Reader Comments (8)
One thing I have noticed is that you need to check the radio button next to "other" for the "other" text to be submitted for analysis.
I don't see a way to add specific words "e.g., "the") to a stop-word list. Nor do I see a way to count word combinations (e.g., "project management" instead of "project" and "management."
I cannot locate any specific Google help files about this tool -- what it is called, how it works, etc.
Nosing around I found this link:
http://documents.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92658&ctx=sibling
which is somewhat ambiguous as to whether new data is displayed in the gadget in real time, or whether there is a spreadsheet setting that controls when updating occurs. Hope this helps...
The standard open text question at the end of many surveys asks something to the effect: Please use this space to address anything not addressed in the survey you feel is important. Ok, that's an invitation for an earful, and analysis can be extremely difficult, time consuming, and expensive because you end up reading small novels.
However, if open text questions were used more tactically, then this gadget might provide real benefit. An example of this more directed, limited type of free text question: Please indicate any new service/product offerings you would like to see.
In this latter case, I think the gadget could provide easily discerned and 'quantified' responses. But its usability is clearly tied to the way in which the question is worded. I don't see it providing helpful analysis for open ended questions as in my former example.