Relevance & Research Question: Contemporary empirical research is increasingly supported with information-communication technologies. Despite playing an extremely important role, online software tools receive only little attention in literature; rare examples include Macer (2002), Crafword (2002, 2006), Vehovar et. al. (2005), Berzelak (2006), Kazcmirek (2006, 2008) and Zuckerberg (2006).
Methods & Data: We used the public WebSM database of 400 online survey tools, where key characteristics were observed for each tool: pricing, code availability, languages, countries, support, website characteristics, promotion etc. The analysis enables studying trends in historical context within CASIC developments. Next, software tools were tested and evaluated according to 50 differentiating features related to questionnaire design, appearance, routing, sample management, multi-mode support, data security, paradata, data export, and reporting. A clustering of existing software was performed based on these characteristics. In addition, as results confirm various customer studies showing that lack of integration (e.g. support to early stages of questionnaire development) is the key deficiency of contemporary web software tools, an experiment was conducted. One group developed a questionnaire the usual way (drafts in a word processor, exchanged via e-mail and only the finalized version converted to the online tool), while the other group developed the same questionnaire using a prototype software which supports full integration from the earliest stage.
Results: Web software tools can be classified into three large groups. However, all three suffer from a relatively weak support for post-survey activities (editing, coding, weighting, analysis), in particular the lack of an integrated support for questionnaire development (on-line collaboration, drafting, archiving, commenting, versioning, editing). Namely, all software assumes a pre-existing questionnaire version, which was already extensively pre-communicated in some external software (e.g. e-mail). The results of the experiment reconfirm the problem: the users clearly prefer the integrated online tool.
Added Value: This is the first comprehensive study of all available web survey software on the market ever. Besides the insight into the status and trends, the results demonstrate key deficiencies of current web software (i.e. lack of integration), while the experiment performed in the study suggests a possible solution.