Intro to surveydown

Due: Sep 16 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 3% of your final grade.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to get familiar with the surveydown survey platform, which we will be using to implement our surveys.

Assessment: This assignment is graded using a check system:

  • ✔+ (110%): Responses shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
  • ✔ (100%): Responses are thoughtful, well-written, and show engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
  • ✔− (50%): Responses are hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that this is essentially a pass/fail system. I’m not grading your writing ability and I’m not counting the number of words you write - I’m looking for thoughtful engagement. One or two sentences is not enough. Write at least a paragraph and show me that you did the readings assigned.

1. Get Organized

Follow these instructions:

  1. Download and edit this template.
  2. Unzip the template folder. Make sure you actually unzip it! (in Windows, right-click it and use “extract all”)
  3. Open the .Rproj file to open RStudio.
  4. Inside RStudio, open the hw3.qmd file, take notes, and write some example code as you go through the readings / exercises below.

2. Readings

Next week we will start getting into designing conjoint surveys for our projects. We will implement them using surveydown, which is a markdown-based platform for designing surveys. The platform allows you to use R or markdown code (just like you would in a .qmd file) to define everything you see in an online survey. While you will be editing a Quarto document, it renders into a Shiny app, which you can then use to administer your survey.

To get familiar with the platform, read the following:

  1. The Introducing Surveydown blog post on the surveydown website.
  2. The Getting Started documentation on the surveydown website.
  3. The Survey Components documentation on the surveydown website.

Take notes as you read the blog post and go through the documentation.

3. Make a practice survey

For practice, try replicating one of the demo surveys listed on the surveydown website. Follow these steps:

  1. Download or clone the GitHub repository associated with the demo survey you chose.
  2. Open RStudio and click “Run Document”, then copy-paste the localhost url into your browser to locally preview the survey.
  3. Make edits to the survey to personalize it. Choose a topic that you find interesting and try modifying at least one question in the survey, then re-render the document to see your chages.

4. Reflect

Reflect on what you’ve learned while going through these readings and exercises. Is there anything that jumped out at you? Anything you found particularly interesting or confusing? Write at least a paragraph in your hw3.qmd file, and include at least one question. The teaching team will review the questions we get and will try to answer them either in Slack or in class.

If you’re unsure where to start with a reflection, try filling out this template:

“I used to think ______, now I think ______ 🤔”

5. Submit

To submit your assignment, follow these instructions:

  1. Render your .qmd file by either clicking the “Render” button in RStudio or running the command quarto::quarto_render("hw3.qmd") command.
  2. Open the rendered html file and make sure it looks good! Is all the formatting as you expected?
  3. Create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment (your hw3.qmd and your demo survey files) and submit it on the corresponding assignment submission on Blackboard.