Research groups in social and behavioral sciences frequently turn to surveys for collecting data. This applies to both brief surveys of individuals in experimental behavioral studies to large-scale population surveys. Digitalization has only advanced these methods, frequently replacing paper questionnaires with online surveys.

Typical tools include FormR, SoSci Survey, Unipark and LimeSurvey.
The former is a free, open-source platform. The latter can be used free of charge by members of universities in Saxony via the Bildungsportal Sachsen. Another tool for creating surveys as well as managing research data in a database is REDCap. However, the other platforms listed here also feature certain functions that are suitable for good research data management.

On all of these platforms, users can create a codebook that accompanies their surveys. Codebooks contain all questions with the types of answers that go with them as well as encoded information (variable descriptions, value labels), also known as metadata. After the data has been collected, the codebook can be downloaded along with the raw survey data to corroborate the data documentation.

REDCap also features the following additional research data management functions:

• Logging of all input data (to ensure complete traceability of all entries/changes/erasures),
• Version check to compare changes to the survey project,
• Option to add test logs,
• Option to add comments to variables and datasets,
• Association of files with survey participants (e.g. raw data from experiments),
• File upload to the project,
• Option to set criteria for automated data quality control.

It can therefore serve as an electronic lab notebook (ELN).

In addition, most survey tools offer the option of exporting data into compatible file formats (R, STATA, SPSS, CSV, XML), making both the raw data as well as metadata from the survey available upon import into the statistical software.

More data, metadata, analysis scripts and descriptions are frequently created in the course of subsequent processing and analysis. Once this processing has been completed, researchers can use an export function (e.g. in SPSS) to convert the final data together with the metadata into a .csv format. This export can be used as a basis for data archiving and publication.

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