Overview

surveydown is a flexible, open-source platform for making surveys with , Quarto, Shiny, and Supabase.

The basic concept is:

1. Design your survey as a Quarto document using markdown and R code.
2. Convert your survey into a Shiny app that can be hosted online and sent to respondents.
3. Store your survey responses in a Supabase database (or any PostgreSQL database).

The {surveydown} R package provides functions to bring this all together.

We recommend reading the Getting Started page to get a sense of how to use surveydown. The rest of the documentation covers more details on how to use surveydown.

Background & Motivation

Most survey platforms (e.g., Google forms, Qualtrics, etc.) use drag-and-drop interfaces to design surveys, making version control and collaboration with others difficult. They’re also not reproducible (others cannot easily reproduce a survey made on these platforms), and many require a paid subscription or license to use.

The surveydown package was designed to address these problems. As an open-source, markdown-based platform, all survey content is defined with plain text (markdown and R code) in a survey.qmd file and an app.R file that renders your survey into a Shiny app that can be hosted online. This makes your survey easy to reproduce, share, and version control with common tools like Git. The survey data collected is also owned by the survey designer in a separate PostgreSQL database (we recommend Supabase as a free and open-source database provider).

If you’re curious where this whole idea came from, check out this blog post, which outlines more on the general idea and the motivation for it. The post is now outdated in terms of the overall package design, but it provides something of an origin story and some of the motivation for developing this project.

Authors

The surveydown project is led by professor John Paul Helveston at George Washington University. The development team consists of the following members:

John Paul Helveston, Ph.D.

John Paul Helveston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at George Washington University. Professor Helveston is the core designer and developer, and maintainer of both the surveydown project and this documentation website.

Pingfan Hu

Pingfan Hu is a Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering at George Washington University, supervised by professor Helveston. Pingfan is mainly responsible for UI design, user interactions, and website maintenance.

Bogdan Bunea

Bogdan Bunea is an undergraduate student majoring in Systems Engineering and minoring in Computer Science at George Washington University. Bogdan is mainly responsible for database connection and data management.

Since surveydown is an open-source package, it is also contributed by a lot of active GitHub users. See the Contributors’ Page for details.