Research Methods in Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management

Panel distribution

Utilising the Contacts section of the Qualtrics Insights Platform allows

researchers to distribute their surveys to a specific cohort of recipients,

for example Railtrack employees. This research technique is common for

a situation where the researcher is employed to carry through an agreed

research procedure including data collection, analysis and possible

recommendations in a consultancy capacity. To technically achieve this, a

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contact list is required. The researcher creates the survey and uploads the

Excel-style contact list for distribution utilising the Qualtrics email

service. There is an option to define the email content when you

distribute the survey and a unique survey link is generated for each

recipient. The email can use piped text to utilise specific details from the

contact list to appear more personal, i.e. ‘Dear ${m://FirstName}’

displays the first field from the contact list, i.e. ‘Paul’.

Utilising a contact list has the additional benefit of scheduling the

distribution and reminders that allow the survey to be resent only to

contacts from the list who have not already taken the survey, and together

with the personalised email should have a positive effect on the response

rate.