Surveys
A flexible tool for data collection.
Last updated
A flexible tool for data collection.
Last updated
Surveys are a useful tool for collecting information. We use them most commonly for gathering information on the distribution of valued places in and around the ocean. Surveys can be crowdsourced (if the survey is simple) or facilitated (our most common use case). Questions may be conditional, optional and may require drawing on a map to collect spatial information.
Survey results may be exported by an administrator as CSV (for non-spatial information) or geojson (for spatial information and associated attributes). At this time, survey results cannot be analyzed in SeaSketch and must be exported for use with desktop tools. We have developed an R-Shiny application for monitoring survey results and several open-source tools for analyzing the spatial results. For information on these tools, contact support@seasketch.org.
Click Create a New Survey and give your survey a name. Note that this name is simply an internal name (Ie., not what your users will see) and I intended to simply distinguish the survey from others you've created as you create more.
Click "Edit Form" to reveal the form editor. As you can tell, the form editor is extremely rich. We recommend taking the time to click through all of these options to get a sense of what the survey can do. By default, your survey will have five survey elements:
Welcome to the Survey (may be edited, not deleted)
Informed Consent (may be edited or deleted)
What is your name (may be edited or deleted)
Save Screen (may be edited, not deleted)
Thank You For Your Response (may be edited, not deleted)
To return to the main page of the survey editor, click the "Welcome to the Surv..." button under Forum Elements on the left.
If you have selected multiple languages for your survey, as I did above, you will see yellow dropdown flags that allow you to switch between language content.
The appearance of your survey is highly customizable. You can change background images, colors, layout, etc. Click "Choose image..." to select an open source image from Unsplash.
Many surveys will require an informed consent that, for example, lays out how user responses will be stored, shared or archived. If you do not require an informed consent in your survey, you may delete this form element by choosing "Delete Element" on the informed consent page.
Replace the placeholder text with information to help users understand why you've asked for their informed consent. Drag and drop a document (e.g., PDF) with your consent form. Every time you drag and drop a new document, your consent form is versioned and SeaSketch keeps track of which version a user has agreed to.
Surveys usually take two forms: facilitated and unfacilitated. In facilitated surveys, a respondent sits with a facilitator who asks questions and uses the SeaSketch survey tool to enter the responses. In an unfacilitated - or crowdsourced - survey, the respondent enters the data directly Ito SeaSketch.
By default, all surveys include the question, "What is your name?" While this element may be deleted, we almost always find it useful to collect user names and (if used) facilitator names.
If your survey is facilitated, keep "Show Facilitation Option" toggled on.
Clicking on the "Add" button at the top of your form elements will reveal a wide variety of elements you may wish to add to your survey. They include:
Email: Validated email input
Consent: Data sharing agreement
Multiple Choice: Choose one or more values
Short Text: Single line of text for short answers
Text Area: Longer text input
Number: Single integer input
Rating: Numeric rating (1-5 stars)
Statement: Rich text block
Yes/No: Boolean input
Combo Box: For large lists of options
Matrix: Choose values for multiple items
Multiple Locations: Collect spatial features with attributes.
Spatial Access Priority: Prioritize by location.
The Multiple Locations form element allows users to draw points lines or polygons and, if so configured, enter attributes for these geographic features.
Click "Add" and choose "Multiple Locations" from the Form Elements side bar. Replace the default text (Where have you seen this species?) with the question you want to ask. For example, "Where do you fish?" Then, select whether this question will require the user to draw a point, line or polygon. By default, the user will draw polygons.
Under your Multiple Locations question in the Form Elements side bar, you'll see a list of Spatial Attributes starting with Location Name which is always required. Click "Add element" and you'll the same list of form elements you saw above, with only two missing (Multiple Locations and Spatial Access Priority).
Click "Base Settings" and notice that you can select among a growing list of supported languages. If you want to issue your survey using one of the listed langauges, you must first ensure that the survey interface has been translated (we use a tool called ). If the interface has been translated, then you will only need to translate the survey content (ie., the questions).
We think that most of these form elements are pretty straight forward. if you need help sorting these out. For now, we'll provide a little more detail on what is undoubtedly going to be two of the most useful form elements in spatial planning: Multiple Locations and Spatial Access Priority.
Select a basemap to use for this question. These are MapBox-based maps that have been added to your project under You may also point to a new basemap that you have published in MapBox.
