Conducting Scientific Surveys with LimeSurvey

 

The Heidelberg University of Education offers the opportunity to carry out your own surveys for your research free of charge via LimeSurvey. This service is available to all researchers, young researchers (doctoral students and postdocs), and master students at the Heidelberg UoE. With LimeSurvey, web-based surveys can be created and carried out. This does not require any programming skills. If you have not worked with LimeSurvey before, you should have the willingness to familiarize yourself independently though. A detailed documentation of LimeSurvey and the FAQs will help you here.

 

Conduct your own survey with LimeSurvey

 To carry out your own survey via LimeSurvey, please send an email to forschung☞ Please insert an @ at this point ☜ph-heidelberg☞ Please insert a period at this point ☜de. In order to process your request quickly, we need the following information:

  • Your name, contact information and your affiliation with the Heidelberg University of Education (= project manager)
  • If necessary, details of other persons who should be able to access the survey (including name, affiliation, and email address)   
  • Title of your survey
  • Duration of how long the survey and the data collected should be accessible to you (not the end of the survey, but how long you need access to the LimeSurvey area itself, e.g. to export the data). After this period, the survey and all details of the participants will be irrevocably deleted. The deadline should only in exceptional cases exceed half a year after the initialization of the survey. If you wish to have access to the survey and data on LimeSurvey for a longer period, please justify this in your request. 

After receiving your request, we will generate an account for you. You will then receive an email with your username and password for the login to LimeSurvey of the HUoE. We will also create an empty survey with the title you specified. Only you (and the admin team) can then edit and conduct your survey and view the associated data. The data collected can be easily exported and processed in various formats.

Note: You are responsible for the content, backup, and privacy of the survey. This includes adhering to the guidelines of good scientific practice and the requirements of data protection.

 Please note that the overall storage space for uploads is limited. In order to give all users the opportunity to upload files (e.g. pictures, videos), please make sure that you only upload files relevant to the research project. We also ask you to use the smallest possible file size for uploads, provided that their function is not excessively restricted.

Expert tip: It is possible to carry out surveys anonymously. If you also make sure that you do not collect any information in your questions and items that can be traced back to the participant, you will have to worry less about data protection and security. Nevertheless, do not forget the information letter at the beginning, with which you inform the participants about the details and the data processing of your study! You can find samples for this on the website of the ethics Committee.

 

Deleting your survey

Would you like to delete your survey and the data collected before the deletion date given in your initial request? Then write us a short message to forschung☞ Please insert an @ at this point ☜ph-heidelberg☞ Please insert a period at this point ☜de stating the exact title of the survey and we will delete it.