Running surveys in multiple languages with a PDA or a Laptop

In the last few years many market research companies are turning to PDA/Laptop device to conduct field surveys. These devices are light, cost effective and have all the computing power to run field surveys software like SurveyToGo (http://www.dooblo.net/mobile-surveys/) and enjoy all the benefits that electronic surveys have over paper based surveys.

In this post I want to cover the aspect of running field surveys in multiple languages at the same time. This is a popular topic as more sophisticated surveys are being conducted in the field by more sophisticated market research companies.

Multi-Language –  Real world example of the challenge

Suppose you are running a survey simultaneously in France, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany. The surveys are exactly the same for statistical reason however the language should be customized to the specific country. You could go about creating 3 different versions of the same survey which would probably work, however this approach has the following drawbacks:

1. Survey creation time – it will be a long process to create the 4 separate surveys, don’t forget that survey logic will need to be re-coded as well.
2. Survey change management –  As we all know, surveys tend to change over time. Some questions are removed, some are added, logic changes etc.. Imagine that all these changes will need to be made 4x times as we have 4 versions of the same survey.

Now, although this would probably work for a one-time project, but if you were to run many of these types of surveys you will probably look for something more robust! J

This is exactly what we want to cover when looking for multi-language support in mobile survey software.

Multi-Language – Example of a solution

So, what do we look for when working with multi-language surveys? Well, I will break it down to the design process and the actual field survey process. In the design process we are looking for:

1. Defining more than 2 languages – Support an unlimited amount of concurrent languages
2. Translation management – Easy export procedure for all the question and answer texts of the survey so that they could be sent to a professional translator and then an easy procedure for importing the translated texts back into the survey.
3. In line editing of translated texts – For a quick fix of a typo, we need to be able to access the translation texts easily.

During the field survey process, we will want to provide the surveyor with the following features on the PDA /Laptop:

1. Choosing the current language – So that the dutch surveyor can set his default language to be dutch and have the survey software use that language texts for the surveys this surveyor conduct.
2. One-click-switch between languages – Allow the surveyor to quickly switch between all the available survey languages so that a single surveyor can conduct one survey in English and the next one in dutch (for example). Also, we need to be able to switch language on a per-question basis for some more advanced surveys.

Do PDA Field survey software packages have support for multi languages?

The answer is yes, some of them do support it. One of the packages that supports multi languages is  SurveyToGo (http://www.dooblo.net/mobile-surveys/) which has recently introduced multi-language inherent support. When using SurveyToGo, you can simple use one version of the survey and then configure multiple languages for the survey.

SurveyToGo is a pay-per-use hosted service which enables you to enjoy a state-of-the-art mobile surveying solution at a great price. There are no setup costs, no IT-costs, no servers to install,   no up-front money commitment and implementation can happen in a “next-day” fashion.

Here are a few screenshots of the multi-language support:

Languages Menu

Here is an example of the excel you can get when exporting all the texts of a survey:

Export all the survey texts

In line changing of survey texts:

Changing the language of current edits

Editing the dutch text of the question (in line) instead of using the file-based approach

And this is how it will look on the device:

Multiple languages on the PDA

Switching between languages

The value of a PDA survey emulator in mobile survey software

While PDA surveys run on handheld PDA devices, the actual survey design is done on the desktop computer which introduces an inherent problem as to how the survey will look like on the actual pda device.

This problem is common one and usually most survey software packages include some sort of a preview of the PDA device. Here is a preview example take from SurveyToGo (www.dooblo.net/stgi):

 

While preview is a good way of getting a sense of how the question will look like on the PDA, when you design a mobile survey you would like a way to see how the entire survey will behave, which includes all the answers, the skip rules, branch rules, validation rules, piping options etc.. to put it in less words: I want to see the entire survey right on my desktop!

One option of course is to deploy the survey to the PDA and see it on the PDA itself. While being the only way that truly shows you a 100% view of the survey, this is usually a very time consuming process requiring you to switch back and forth from the desktop to the PDA, identify problems, correct them on the desktop and then deploy the survey again to the PDA. Try it once on a big complicated survey and you will get tired of it real quick

Another big concern is device orientation. Are you running the survey on a landscape device? Or maybe a square screen device? Good luck getting preview of these..

 

So, do we have any other option?

 

Luckily we do. SurveyToGo (www.dooblo.net/stgi), a PDA survey software solution allows you to run your PDA survey on a desktop PDA emulator which gives you a sense of how the survey will behave on a PDA right from the comfort of your desktop. Moreover, when you change your survey, you won’t even have to save the survey to see the changes in the emulator. The emulator will automatically pickup the change and will reload the survey for you, making on-the-fly changes a no-brainer and making survey design finally an easier task!

 

Here’s a sample of the Survey Emulator that runs from your desktop:

And here is a sample of the emulator that runs in Landscape mode:

Square screen support as well! Cool!

Designing mobile surveys using the emulator as a checking tool makes survey design a much easier and bearable task for everyone, especially for those who don’t have a PDA handy at all times