What makes SoSci Survey so special?

SoSci Survey addresses very different users: Professional market researchers need different tools than social scientists who test experimental procedures. However, most online surveys simply require an intuitive interface to create the online questionnaire. And this is exactly what SoSci Survey offers.

In the background SoSci Survey provides an enormous range of functions and combines them with the possibility to use own program code (PHP) in the questionnaire. Thus, even highly complex challenges in the context of an online survey can be successfully mastered, e.g.

  • Live evaluation for the participant (Demo: Conflict Screening)
  • Complex filter guidance and randomization
  • Mobile Experience Sampling (MESM, send invitations by SMS)

Many Features, Simple Administration

  • SoSci Survey runs without installation as a cloud service directly on the Internet (but is also available as software package to be installed on premises)
  • Detailed user manual with extensive examples (A Questionnaire in 5 Minutes)
  • Video tutorials for a quick start
  • Personal online support
  • Clearly arranged list of questions
  • Comfortable creation of an online questionnaire
  • Data export to SPSS, GNU R, Stata (each including labels) and Excel
  • Easy exchange of the logo
  • Large selection of designs (customizable as needed, manual: Questionnaire Layouts)
  • Integration of images, audio and video files
  • Mandatory questions and a one-time follow-up for missing answers (probing)
  • Online Experiments (Manual: Randomization)
  • Rotation of items and response options
  • Use of a participant's previous answers in follow-up questions ("piping")
  • Standard filter guide ("skip logic", "branching", "micro tailoring")
  • Pretest features
  • Questionnaires also work on tablets and smartphones (responsive layouts)
  • Barrier-free questionnaires (Instructions: Survey of Visually Impaired Persons)
  • High level of data protection (Data Protection in Online Surveys)
  • More than 30 predefined question types with numerous display variants

Features for Professional Users

Many companies and institutes in the field of market research and management consulting regularly use SoSci Survey for conducting online surveys.

In close exchange with our users we have designed numerous functions that make the professional use of SoSci Survey much more efficient:

  • Exchange of questions between different survey projects
  • Definition of own templates for individual questions and entire questionnaire modules
  • Export/import of translations in multilingual surveys
    (simple cooperation with translation agencies)
  • Easy integration of access panels
    (with redirects for quota full, screen out and completes)
  • Real-time response control
  • Participant management with reminder function
  • Sending individualized SMS directly from SoSci Survey
  • Access restrictions for surveys
    (including individual access URLs, one-time passwords and IP network ranges)
  • Provision of preview links to the client
  • Third party access to completed questionnaires
  • Possibility to use the software on your own survey server
  • Fully customizable designs
  • Questionnaires work reliably for years

Features for Complex Challenges

A large percentage of the users of SoSci Survey are researchers at universities. They often work with experimental methods that go far beyond the standard repertoire of survey software. In the past, SoSci Survey was able to meet almost any challenge - and if not, the software was extended accordingly.

The following list of functionality makes no claim to be complete:

  • Freely programmable filters
  • Extended processing of participant entries directly in the questionnaire
  • Integration of HTML and JavaScript
  • Dynamic content
  • Special question types for mobile devices (touch devices)
  • Measurement of time spent per page (server side) and item response times (client side)
  • Equally distributed randomisation/experimental groups (manual: Randomisation)
  • Support for longitudinal and diary studies (Manual: Multi-Wave Surveys)
  • Support of multi-level designs (Manual: Multi-Level Structure
  • Multilingual survey projects (Manual: Multilingual Questionnaires)
  • Support of international characters via UTF-8 and text direction from right to left (Russian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese, ...)
  • Connection of external online survey instruments
    (e.g. tracking software for selective exposure studies, Leiner, Scherr & Bartsch, 2016)
  • Creating randomized delivery schedules for invitation mails and SMS (MESM)
  • Project-internal database, e.g. for the import of external data

Additional Features

Some special additional functions can be booked as modules for a fee: