Internet Behavior
and Addiction - Home
Generating a questionnaire for the WWW
The questionnaire was built in HTML V2.0. Special
attention was paid, such that no new features (like tables) were used in
the questionnaire, so that older browsers could also use the questionnaire.
However this had the drawback that question 3.3 could not be presented as
usually done in psychological questionnaires. There were also no graphics
integrated, except the ruler so that the size of the questionnaire would
not be to large.
To facilitate the data evaluation, each selection
was assigned a value (e.g. <OPTION value="1">no). This had
the advantage of creating separate evaluations for the two languages of
the questionnaire.
Each question was numbered, so that an automating
script could process the file.
There were three different possibilities for transferring
the questionnaire data (described in Peter Flynn, 95):
1. Transfer by e-mail.
This was not applicable, because the data had to
be treated individually afterwards. Additionally, the mail-to button does
not work with the Internet Explorer and MSExchange together.
2. Transfer by a program that is started on the server
and takes the questionnaire data as command line input.
This was not applicable, because the questionnaire
data was longer than 255 characters, and this is the longest input possible
for a command line parameters.
3. Transfer by a program is started on the server
and takes the data as standard input.
This was applicable. A C++ program (see appendix)
was constructed and put in the directory cgi-bin. The program was started
when the Send - button in the questionnaire was pressed. It reads the questionnaire
data, removed variable names from the data and put the variable value in
the correct column. This processed data was then appended to the survey
file as a new line, so that the data could easily be read by a spread sheet
or statistics program. The program returned at the end a newly created WWW
- page with the possibility of registering for the competition and results.
The registration data was then written by a second program to a separate
file. This was done to insure anonymity, so that the users could not be
traced back.
Additional information about doing surveys on the
Internet can be found under:
survey
faq for Internet surveys (language german)
an introduction to writing HTML - pages is in:
Peter Flynn (1995), The World Wide Web Handbook,
International Thomson Computer Press .