What is surveydown?

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

image showing the three technologies used in the surveydown platform along with their logos: quarto (for designing surveys), shiny (for rendering the survey), and supabase (for storing data)


Here’s how it works:

  1. Design your survey as a Quarto document using markdown and R code.
  2. Render your survey into a Shiny app that can be hosted online and sent to respondents.
  3. Store survey responses in a PostgreSQL database - we recommend Supabase as a free, secure, and easy to use option.

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

See the complete documentation to get started making your own surveydown survey!

Why surveydown?

Most survey platforms (e.g., Google forms, Qualtrics, etc.) use graphic interfaces or spreadsheets to define survey content, making version control, collaboration, and reproducibility difficult or impossible. The surveydown package was designed to address these problems. As an open-source, markdown-based platform, all survey content is defined using plain text (markdown and R code) in two files:

  • survey.qmd: A Quarto document that contains the survey content (pages, questions, etc).
  • app.R: An R script defining a shiny app that contains global settings (libraries, database configuration, etc.) and server configuration options (e.g., conditional skipping / display, etc.).

This approach makes your survey easy to reproduce, share, and version control with common tools like Git. And since all survey data is stored in a PostgreSQL database, you have total control over where your survey data lives. We provide direct support for Supabase as a free, secure, and easy to use option.

In case you’re interested in the background behind the project, this blog post provides something of an origin story. Note that the design discussed in the post is now quite outdated with what ultimately became surveydown.

Authors

The surveydown project is led by professor John Paul Helveston at George Washington University and was originally developed in collaboration with his students Pingfan Hu and Bogdan Bunea.

As an open-source package, surveydown now has many more contributors who have added features and improved the project over time. See the Contributors’ Page for details.


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.

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