Folio Surveyor takes a study from a blank instrument to analyzed responses without leaving Folio. It's part of the Chair plan.
Building an instrument
Start a new survey and add questions of any type — Likert scales, multiple choice, open text, ranking. As you write, Surveyor watches for the wording problems that quietly bias results: leading phrasing, loaded terms, lopsided scales, and double-barreled items. It flags them the way a careful colleague would, before you distribute. (If you want the why behind those flags, see our post on survey questions that don't lead.)
If you're stuck on coverage, AI item generation can draft candidate questions for a construct you name — a starting point to edit down, not a finished instrument.
Delphi rounds
For expert-consensus studies, Surveyor supports Delphi rounds: distribute, collect, feed the aggregated responses back to participants, and run the next round. Each round is tracked so you can see how consensus forms (or doesn't) across iterations.
Translating a survey
Need the instrument in another language? Surveyor translates the whole thing — questions, options, and scale labels — and keeps scientific terms consistent, so the same concept is rendered the same way every time rather than drifting between synonyms. You review the translation side by side with the original and pick, question by question, which translations to accept. Accepted translations are baked into a new version of the survey, so respondents see a properly localized instrument, not an English survey with a language toggle.
Distributing
Publish the survey to get a shareable participant link. Responses come in anonymously by default. The distribution surface handles right-to-left languages natively, so Arabic and Hebrew instruments read correctly for respondents.
Analyzing results
The Results view summarizes responses per question — distributions, scale means, and open-text answers. Two ways to take the data further:
- Export to a live Google Sheet. One click creates a Google Sheet with your results and hands you the link, so you can pivot, chart, or share with collaborators in a tool they already know. (Requires the Google connection to be configured for your workspace.)
- Download the raw responses for your own analysis.
Tips
- Pilot before you publish. Send the instrument to a handful of people outside your field and ask what each question is asking. It catches more than a solo re-read.
- Translate last. Get the source-language instrument right first — every fix afterward has to be re-translated.
- Keep a neutral middle. Forcing a side manufactures opinions that don't exist; offer a genuine neutral and, where honest, a "not applicable."