You've created an online survey form using SurveyGold. You've distributed it to your respondents and they are filling out the form in droves. Magically the online survey responses start flowing into your SurveyGold application. All seems well until a thought crosses your mind, "Are my online survey responses being processed securely?"
 
It's a legitimate question and this article unpacks the details regarding the security of your SurveyGold online survey responses.

Before getting into the details of online survey security, it's probably a good idea to review just how your online survey responses are processed. The SurveyGold application is a workstation-based survey authoring and data collection solution. It provides the ability for you to create an online survey form that can be placed on your website or, more commonly, on a website available our online service.
 
What the Respondent Does: When a respondent submits responses to your online survey form, those online survey responses are sent securely from the respondent's web browser across the Internet and recorded on the surveygold.com website.

What You Do: Later, when you perform the Update Activity action in your SurveyGold application, those online survey responses are moved securely from the surveygold.com website across the Internet to the SurveyGold application that resides on your computer.
 
When we say "online survey responses are sent securely" we mean it. Responses are sent across the Internet using Transport Layer Security (TLS), the leading Internet encryption technology.
 
A pictorial overview of online survey form processing is available here.

The SurveyGold Online Services platform on the Internet is the behind-the-scenes hub in our online survey processing solution. In contrast to the majority of other online survey solutions, one distinctive aspect of SurveyGold is that it delivers online survey responses to an application on your computer. Here is why our solution is designed this way:

• It makes it feasible to deploy an online survey solution in an uncomplicated way that does not require information technology staff involvement. The SurveyGold solution is hassle free.
• It would not be possible to provide such an affordable survey solution without our online service as the lynchpin because it avoids the associated costs of installing expensive web server components and database components on your website.

Protecting the privacy of online survey responses submitted via our online service is our highest value. Our servers are actively tested by a third-party for PCI compliance. Online survey responses are encrypted while they are stored on the surveygold.com website. Nothing is done with the responses other than staging them transiently while they await delivery to the SurveyGold application on your computer. As they are downloaded to your computer, they are moved to an archival location on our online service website to serve as a backup and to provide you the ability to share survey responses in real-time with other SurveyGold users via the Shared Responses feature.

By the way, the online survey responses that are recorded on surveygold.com are completely encrypted when they come to rest and contain just one thing: responses. There is no contextual question data recorded on our online service.
 
This is by design so that the only place that responses are correlated to their associated questions is when they responses are downloaded via SurveyGold application to the survey author's computer. Your online survey responses reside in your SurveyGold application database (which is an encrypted file on your computer) after you have collected them into your SurveyGold application. After the responses are downloaded to your computer, they are moved to an archival location on our online service website to serve as a backup and to provide you the ability to share survey responses in real-time with other SurveyGold users via the Shared Responses feature.

Golden Hills Software is commited to integrity and honoring the implicit fiduciary trust that our global customer base has come to rely upon. To that end, we have published a privacy policy which outlines how our website is run and how responses are managed and what specific measures we employ to protect response data across the entire SurveyGold solution (both the website and your application).

Here is the lowdown on how to create Likert scale questions using SurveyGold.

STEP 1: CREATE A SECTION TO CONTAIN LIKERT SCALE QUESTIONS

The first thing you will want to do is create a section in which to put Likert scale questions that have the same set of response choices. SurveyGold automatically creates a matrix presentation style when all of the questions in a given section have the exact same set of responses. So, that addresses the matrix presentation style aspect of your Likert scale survey questions.

STEP 2: ADD LIKERT SCALE QUESTIONS TO THE SECTION

The next thing you will want to do is add your questions to the aforementioned section. A key thing to know is that SurveyGold automatically assigns an integer point value (called an "enumeration) to each response in a given set of responses. This is done without any extra effort on your part as the survey author. To be a bit geeky about it, the point value of each response choice is based on the ordinal position of a response choice in the set of responses for a question. So, if you Likert scale question looks something like this...

= = = = 

I like shoveling snow.

( ) Strongly Agree

( ) Agree

( ) Neither

( ) Disagree

( ) Strongly Disagree

= = = =

...then SurveyGold already has assigned a point value of 1 for Strongly Agree, 2 for Agree, 3 for Neither, 4 for Disagree and 5 for Strongly Disagree. So, that addresses the scoring aspect.

STEP 3: VIEW/ANALYZE LIKERT SCALE QUESTION RESPONSES

Finally, with regards to analysis/reporting, SurveyGold automatically calculates mean, mode, median, min, max and standard deviation based on these enumeration values. These calculations appear in graphs in the View Results tab as well as the Publish Word and Publish Web actions in the Analyze Results tab. The enumeration values also appear when responses are converted to Excel, SPSS, text, etc., via the Convert Response action in the Analyze Results tab when using the record layout option of "One response per record". This makes it easy to perform your own calculations using other applications.

See the brief View Results video tutorial for more information.

SurveyGold provide a survey author with the ability to create a survey one time and conduct the same survey in multiple ways. So, the same survey can be conducted online, via paper, via a kiosk and in-person while providing the ability to gather all of the responses into a unified set of responses for reporting and analysis.

This is useful in a context where survey respondents are comprised of a mix of people who use computers, tables, smart phones as well as people who do not. An example of this kind of context is a manufacturing environment where there are people in the administrative area who have access to computers and assembly line employees who do not use desktop/notebook computers. In this context, we have seen our customers deploy a web survey to people in administrative area and a paper survey to those on the assembly line.

SurveyGold provides the flexibility to create a survey once and deploy it in multiple ways that are appropriate to a given respondent. This is just another way that our solutions are making it easier to reach all the people you need to survey.

Greetings,

You may have noticed that we have completely overhauled our website. The new website reflects the fresh ideas we will be rolling out in upcoming maintenance releases of the SurveyGold application and online services.

We are going after several objectives with the redesign. Foremost amongst them is to make the layout more consistent and to make the content more accessible whether your are in front of a computer or on a mobile device. 
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If you want to keep up with what's going on with SurveyGold, I invite you to subscribe to this blog. I look forward to staying better connected with you all. We've got some exciting stuff in store for you. Stay tuned...

Cheers,
Chuck