The steps involve in a typical Inet data collection project includes:
1. Inet will program and host your survey. Your MS Word questionnaire is programmed for the internet and runs on the Inet ICT server. These are self-administrated surveys where the respondent starts and completes the survey on their own, with little or no support. A test link is made available to review the survey by you and your client. You approve the online survey and/or it is returned with any revisions.
2. Inet will localize surveys for international studies. Inet employs a linguist who lives in (or from) the respective country and, if required, is educated in specific markets (i.e. physician studies.)
3. After translation, as an option, you can review the survey prior to fielding and required changes can made.
4. Inet can include exit links to take the respondent back to the online panel web site.
5. Inet recruit the sample to meet the study quotas. For instance, if the response rate is 10% and the quota is 50, and for the sake of simplicity let’s assume that 100% will qualify for the survey, the study may need to make 500 contacts.
6. Inet provides you with an online reporting link to review the number of completes, terminates, over quotas and incompletes and if you wish, a top line report is available for each question in the survey.
7. Inet may e-mail the invitations. An ID is assigned to each member recruited for the study. Then the e-mail is sent to each member inviting them to participate in the online survey. In the invitation is an URL to the questionnaire. To make this easier Inet may create a set of unique links by placing the individual IDs at the end of each URL link.
8. Inet manages the respondent process. This starts after the invitation is e-mailed. To gain access the respondent simply clicks on the link in the e-mail invitation. The ID is at the end of the link. It is a “password” giving the respondent immediate and private and secure access to the online survey. Using an e-mail address, at the bottom of every page of the survey, support is available to the respondent to answer their questions regarding the process or survey. Inet provides both first and second level support.
9. Inet provisions and distribute incentives. Once the survey is finished, Inet collects the IDs from the data file of respondents that completed the survey.
10. Finally Inet delivers you a fix length ASCII, CSV or SPSS data files and a code sheet to the researcher for tabulation and/or verbatim coding purposes. Inet may translate the open end (or Other please specify) text back to English.