Thanks Jacci,

In my case, gathering statistical data is a SECONDARY goal. It may be important down the road, but right now the PRIMARY goal, is to build a questionnaire, and then provide the interviewee with a custom set of reports, and to specifically act on what they told us in the questionnaire. The intent is assess the client/interviewee's e-business requirements. E.g. do you have dsl service - yes/no, if yes - is it reliable, is it fast, no - do you have dial up networking etc. Then based upon the answers to make a set of recommendations for improvement. A secondary goal after numerous questionairres have been conducted, would be to determine statistics with respect to who answered what. But the primary goal is to help the client develop an 'E-Business Strategy'

But I am interested in designing the system such that the design is conducive to statistical evaluation, if or when it becomes necessary. I'm interested in understanding your idea about 'not 'tweaking' the survey. I'd like to explore that further. I would be happy to talk to you further. E-mail me back separately, or write here, or call me at 908-526-6665 x201

Right now, the survey 'administration module' is pretty much built, it is pretty straightforward. What I'm having a hard time with now, is the module for building the survey. I can manually edit the question/answer survey definition tables - but it is very tedious and error prone. I'm working on an end user module to let the user (and me) build the questionnaire systematically - many issues !




>Hi David,
>
>I have a client that would be very interested if I could create or find them a survey program they could use themselves. Right now for small surveys or one time surveys the client puts them together using Access. Every time I think about doing this for them I have to remind myself what a monumental task this would be. I really haven't looked into what's already out there or the cost of it.
>
>Another reason I've held off is that in order to get good results over time the survey can't change. If you let them tweak the survey each time you can no longer "mine" the data in a consistent manner. Or you have to write a linking application. My client takes the results and uses SPSS to run stats on the data.
>
>I would be interested in corresponding with you more and talking about our needs.
>
>Jacci
>
>>I am designing/coding a VFP based survey/questionnaire program for a client. It is turning out to be very complicated. I'm wondering if anyone has tackled such a project. I'm hoping to share ideas on design, database design. There are commercial programs out there - but none that meet my needs. One - http://www.raosoft.comn uses dbfs - but doesn't quite fit.
>>
>>Trying to make a truly data driven program that handles lots of different branching logic is daunting. If anyone is interested, or has done similar work I will share more details on the particulars of the design issues I am facing, have resolved etc.