People frequently ask me where I post online surveys. Usually, they want to know where they can get people to take their surveys for free. I have carried out a lot of research that includes what I call “Web samples.” These are unpaid, but I do often offer incentives in the form of drawings for gift certificates or related prizes. Below, I will list the various places I use to share links to my surveys. First, I will make a few suggestions. Use the Table of Contents to jump straight to site links if you are in a hurry.
Table of contents
Keep it short, easy, and engaging
Target your audience
Offer an incentive
Places to post online surveys
Keep it short, easy, and engaging
If you expect people to complete your survey for free, make it enjoyable. Many people welcome a five-minute distraction. Few want to spend half an hour slogging through repeated Likert-type questionnaires. Mix it up. design experiments with short, engaging essays. Allow participants to express their opinion. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I have found that people love to write on surveys. Coding open-ended responses is labor-intensive for the researcher, but sometimes it’s the best way to get participants to willingly and thoroughly respond to the question or prompt.
Make your stimuli or tasks easy. People would generally rather watch a video than read a short story. They’d rather watch a 3 minute video than a 5 minute one, and they’d certainly rather read five paragraphs than five pages. They’d probably rather rate pictures or complete a short “test” than do either.
Target your audience
Engaging means interesting to the specific participants. Most of the sites I list below are general audience, but I strongly suggest posting surveys in relevant groups. For example, if I am studying science fiction, I will post the survey in science fiction groups. You can ask permission to do so on Goodreads discussions. Facebook has an interesting Science Fiction page that tends to be male dominated (good if you want to balance a female-heavy sample).
But don’t be a fair-weather community member and read the rules!
If you suddenly appear out of the blue to post online surveys, you aren’t going to be well-received. What is more, many groups have rules about posting links to other websites (including survey engines). When in doubt, ask. Sometimes if you ask permission to share an online survey, you’ll be allowed to do it. You are more likely to be given permission if you have been an active member of the community.
This isn’t as difficult to do as it might seem. Most of us tend to study topics we find interesting… For example, I study morality, narrative, and the imagination, and I love science fiction. Morality, narrative, and the imagination happen quite a bit in the production and consumption of science fiction.
Even apparently unrelated interests may intersect with your research. You can make it happen! I did this last year. I had been studying the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (the perceived inability to engage with morally deviant fictional worlds) in the context of learning from narratives. People cannot learn from fiction if they refuse to engage with it! Another thing that prevents people learning from narratives (or anything else) is psychological reactance, or the perceived threat to freedom of choice. Reactance is generally studied with reference to safety and health (e.g., brushing your teeth, fastening seat belts. Because I love horses (see my blog, Wild Horses), I have seen reactance in action my entire life–to helmets!
It was an easy step from wondering how to combine the study of media and reactance to designing a study on helmet use in equestrians. Because I had been a member of many online horse fora for years, it was easy for me to post links to my online survey in them. (See the preliminary results of this study here.)
Offer an incentive
Even your mother is going to be more willing to complete your surveys (after she gets over the excitement of you being a scientist) if you offer an incentive. Clearly, if you are thinking about posting online surveys anywhere outside of MTurk or other paid services, you are working on a budget. But you can always offer something. I usually do drawings for a set number of prizes. The easiest (and possibly most widely appreciated) is an Amazon.com gift card.
You can also ask for sponsorship. For example, Trauma Void donated three topnotch helmets for me to raffle as incentives for my helmet use study. Riding Warehouse and Trafalgar Square Books donated gift certificates. Importantly, these were prizes that my targeted sample–horseback riders–would want to win.
Places to post online surveys
You may have surveys that are not targeted to a specific audience, or you may want a broad sample. There are several sites that welcome sharing of academic surveys.
My favorite place to post online surveys is Psychological Research on the Net. Managed by Dr. John Krantz at Hanover College, this site attracts participants from all over the world. Presumably, many have been told to complete academic research as part of a psychology course. Some of the data are bad–you will need to clean everything carefully (see my data cleaning post). But you will get lots of responses, pretty much year round. Dr. Krantz is very responsive and will put up and take down surveys with amazing alacrity.
Another good place is Social Psychology Network. I’ve never really figured out how to get my surveys off their site in a timely manner, but they do post them quickly. They don’t seem to get that much traffic (or people don’t like my surveys), but you will get some decent data.
Reddit is another potential source of participants. The subreddit r/SampleSize allows posting of academic (and other) surveys. There are rules about how to title your post (follow them or your post will be taken down). You can also go to theme-based subreddits for your target audience.
Survey Circle offers a place to share and take surveys. I haven’t had much luck with them, but then, I haven’t spent much time trying to figure the site out. I do get frequent emails from them in my capacity as research enthusiast (survey taker), so I can vouch for their effort to reach out to potential participants.
You can also share surveys on other social networking sites, such as Twitter, Tumblr, and on your own Facebook pages or profile.
There are many psychology student and research groups on Facebook. One of the best (not least because it lists lots of other places to post surveys) is called Research Participation – Dissertation, Thesis, PhD, Survey Sharing. The idea with this page (and most of the others I will share below) is that you will complete some people’s surveys and they will return the favor. It’s aimed at students completing their theses and dissertations, and it’s huge.
Others:
Psychology Participants & Researchers
Psychology Research: Today!
Your university’s groups…
That’s all I can think of for now. There may be others that occur to me, if so I will add. Feel free to suggest new places in the comments, I promise they will be much appreciated by any researchers who come here!
