What is your opinion worth? To a growing number of survey companies it is quite valuable. The Internet offers a new medium for these companies to obtain market research data. This type of data has traditionally been gathered by telephone and mail surveys. Both of the old fashioned means of data collection tend to be expensive because of the typically low response rate. Some of the money that would have been spent on phone and mail surveys can be used as a motivation for Internet users to fill out surveys.

As with most ventures on the Net, acquiring market research by Internet survey is still a rapidly evolving field. Each company has a slightly different approach to providing incentives to get us to fill out the surveys. The one thing they all have in common is they have a registration and qualification process. Normally you register once and obtain a user name and password. Most sites have you fill out a rather lengthy profile when you register. Some use this profile to determine who is eligible for which surveys and some sites have qualifying surveys that you must complete before being considered for each study. The incentives I have seen consist of one or more of the following -- entry into a cash or prize drawing, accumulating points for prizes, or direct payment of cash. The one thing that makes the cash and prize drawings more attractive than your average Internet contest is that your odds are usually better since there tend to be less participants.Market researchers have perfected many different techniques for creating highly dynamic surveys research. Dynamic surveys research permits the collection of detailed responses in a quick manner. When dynamic surveys research is thoughtfully constructed, respondents should enjoy taking the survey and should perceive that it has been an economical session. If respondents to surveys research begin to weary of the questions "mid-stream," it means that the market researcher has failed in the construction of the surveys research. As in any marketing effort, the goal is engage the customer.Piping is a form of survey question used in surveys research when a market researcher wants to find out more about a question that the respondent has already answered. Piping is a variant of branching. Piping is configured on the same screen as simple branching. The key benefit of piping is that it permits complex chains of questions and responses that are all determined by the respondent's answers to previous questions. Here is how it works.

First consider that the linkage in piping questions are referred to as "values." These are not number values, but instead are strings of text (variables) written in computer codes. It is not as complex as it sounds, and most computer software platforms designed for building surveys research online do all the hard work for you. The market researcher using a dynamic surveys research software application will only see the choices for variable codes in user language -- whatever language the customer actually speaks and not the computer's preferred language. Let's look at an example.

If the survey question is: "Select the type of new cars your friends have purchased." Then the response choices might be: Combustion or Unicycle