I am a returning member from Australia! I need help with organising and collating results for a survey I am doing for my studies. This includes complete 50 surveys and recording the results. What is the best way to do this???

We're happy to help you with any organizing questions you may have but no, you may not use this forum to solicit survey answers. Sorry.

Gilly92, if the survey is for university studies, I'm surprised the professors have not given you some direction in this. Contact professors in statistics, sociology, or psychology (among other fields) for advice, as they use surveys all the time in their research. There are a number of online tools to help you collect surveys, record, and analyze the results. One service that our university subscribes to is called Survey Monkey. I'm sure there are others out there, too. Talk to a librarian at your university - they are often quite familiar with some of the commonly used electronic resources available at your institution.

Otherwise, I believe Excel should be able to easily handle the results of 50 surveys, if you know how to use that program.

If you go to classes 5 days a week, just aim to grab 5 random people you meet at school (or on your way to or from school depending on your population requirements). If you do 5 every day, you'll be done in two weeks.

People did that all the time at my university, especially the Psych students working on their theses. Also, sometimes if the professor allows, you could make an announcment in various classes and pass around a sign up sheet if it's a more involved thing.

I once did a survey for a student at a McDonald's; she asked me if I'd be willing, and I said yes. I've also done some by phone, but probably you shouldn't do that; most people don't like unsolicited calls.

Yes, these days, computer software as mentioned above is the way to go. Years ago, I participated in creating, and later tabulating, results of a major survey done for our church. Computers were a gleam in someone's eye back then - we did everything manually. And it took hours, even days. I think if there is a way to get comments, too, you could maybe provide a way for people to say or type them, or agree to have you record them in a live survey. Otherwise, if you can arrange for the answers to be scored as A, B, C, etc., they can be analyzed by computer and the results will be obtained much faster.

Good luck, and let us know what you did and how it turned out.