English Dialect Survey
Description
One of my friends, Lyndsey Nay, is a Linguistics graduate student at BYU. She's was doing a research study in Fall 2005 in which she looked at people's ability to correctly recognize different English dialects. The study consisted of nine tracks each with different native English speakers saying the same sentence.
At first, Lyndsey went around and gave the survey by hand. She had a CD to play and a form for the survey taker to fill out. Lyndsey approached me and asked if we could somehow do the survey online. And of course, the answer was yes. I constructed a simple mysql-driven survey built with php. The survey had a consent form, questionnaire, and then presented the user with the sound files in a random order. Once they had answered all the questions, their responses went into a database.
To make data analysis easier, I also created grading and report pages. Each person's answers could be viewed, marked as right or wrong, and changed to fix spelling. Graphs were automatically generated that showed a brief summary for each person. Each question could also be looked at for their total statistics. This statistics could then be broken down further by limiting what data you wanted to see by gender, language ability, and age. Finally, all this data could be exported to an automatically generated CSV file. Needless to say, Lyndsey was impressed.