University Decision Support
Survey research
Discover essential information, tools, and best practices to help you design, distribute, and interpret surveys effectively. This site supports your efforts to gather meaningful insights and make data-informed decisions.
Best practices for survey success
UDS offers support throughout the entire process—from creating and administering the survey to analyzing and presenting the results. For help, reach out to [email protected].
Build your survey
Design your survey thoughtfully, before creating a survey, make sure your questions can’t already be answered by existing data or gathered through other means.
Clearly define your survey objectives and identify your target audience.
Design your survey thoughtfully. Select appropriate question types, use clear and unbiased wording, and organize the survey flow in a logical, easy-to-follow sequence.
Pre-test your survey to ensure it’s engaging and easy to complete.
Maximize survey participation
Effectively communicate the value of your survey to your target audience—help them understand why their input matters.
Choose your timing carefully. Provide a reasonable completion window and avoid sending surveys during high-stress periods like exams, study days, or holidays.
If you promise confidentiality, make sure to follow through. Protect participant privacy and ensure data security at every stage of the process.
Review the Question Bank
Each year, University Decision Support administers a wide range of national and locally developed surveys to students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Before creating a new survey, check out our survey question bank—you may find existing questions that already address your needs.
- Sign in with your Northeastern credentials to access the full bank.
- Use filters to search by survey name, target population, or keyword.
- Hover over or click on any question to view a detailed list of response options.
If you have trouble logging in with your username and password, please contact [email protected] for support.
What to know when running a survey
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Planning your survey audience
- Clarify what you want to learn or achieve.
- Identify who needs to provide the information (your target population).
- Decide whether to survey the entire population (census) or a representative sample.
To assure the protection of human subjects and to comply with federal law, survey administrator(s) are responsible for following Northeastern University Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes. All human participant research conducted by Northeastern University investigators, students, and staff, and any others conducting research at Northeastern or utilizing Northeastern resources, must seek prior approval from IRB.
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Is there a privacy policy in place?
Survey participation must be free from coercion. Survey administrator(s) must notify the participants that their participation is voluntary and they are free to opt out of their research study without penalty.
Survey administrator(s) must state clearly in instructions whether the survey is anonymous or confidential. If identifying information needs to be collected, it must be explicitly requested as an item on the survey, so as to not give the impression that the survey is anonymous.
If subjects are promised anonymity, the researcher(s) must ensure that identifying information will not be collected or stored in a way that it can be connected to survey individual responses.
If subjects are promised confidentiality, the researcher(s) must make every effort to guard sensitive information and prevent anyone outside of the project from connecting individual responses with their identities.
The survey must include “contact information” (name, email address) should the respondents have any questions about the study.
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Timing your survey
In our efforts to coordinate the administration of institutional surveys involving students, faculty, and staff at the university, we created a Survey Calendar.
If you are planning a survey, we encourage you to check the survey calendar to avoid potential conflict with other surveys and to help minimize “survey fatigue” among the university community. Please contact [email protected] to have your survey added to this calendar.
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Survey communications
Due to the high volume of surveys administered at Northeastern, university policy prohibits the use of mass distribution channels, such as blast emails or Learning Management System (LMS) platforms, for survey dissemination. These channels are reserved for institutional surveys that are prioritized for student participation and essential to university-wide assessment efforts.
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Incentive guidelines
Northeastern doesn’t offer monetary incentives for survey completion. Please note that in case special permission to use incentives is granted, all University Decision Support employees including student employees, senior vice provosts, senior vice presidents, deans, the provost, and the president, and other parties involved in the survey’s design and administration will not be eligible to win survey incentive prizes. The immediate families (parents, children, and siblings) of all persons listed here are also ineligible for survey incentive prizes.
Tools and training resources
Qualtrics, Northeastern’s official web-based survey software, is available to all current faculty, staff, and students. The survey tool supports research, teaching, and administration by allowing users to create survey instruments, administer surveys, store data and conduct analysis. Also, learn how to avoid survey fatigue and maximize the usefulness of the data generated from these surveys.