Digital Psychological Platform for Mass Web-Surveys

Abstract

Web-surveys are one of the most popular forms of primary data collection used for various researches. However, mass surveys involve some challenges. It is required to consider different platforms and browsers, as well as different data transfer rates using connections in different regions of the country. Ensuring guaranteed data delivery in these conditions should determine the right choice of technologies for implementing web-surveys. The paper describes the solution to transfer a questionnaire to the client side in the form of an archive. This technological solution ensures independence from the data transfer rate and the stability of the communication connection with significant survey filling time. The conducted survey benefited the service of education psychologists under the federal Ministry of Education. School psychologists consciously took part in the survey, realizing the importance of their opinion for organizing and improving their professional activities. The desire to answer open-ended questions in detail created a part of the answers in the dataset, where there were several sentences about different aspects of professional activity. An important challenge of the problem is the Russian language, for which there are not as many tools as for the languages more widespread in the world. The survey involved 20,443 school psychologists from all regions of the Russian Federation, both from urban and rural areas. The answers did not contain spam, runaround answers, and so on as evidenced by the average response time. For the surveys, an authoring development tool DigitalPsyTools.ru was used.

Keywords

• mass web-surveys
• LDA
• text preprocessing
• open questions