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Category: Tool Comparisons

  • Which Survey Platform Can You Actually Use for a UK Student Dissertation? (2026)

    Which Survey Platform Can You Actually Use for a UK Student Dissertation? (2026)

    This is not really a features comparison. Every platform below will build you a questionnaire with branching logic and export a spreadsheet. The decision is made somewhere else entirely: your university has almost certainly already decided which tools you are permitted to use, and using the wrong one can invalidate your ethical approval.

    So the criterion here is compliance first, convenience second.

    Jisc Online Surveys Qualtrics Microsoft Forms Google Forms
    Built for UK academic research Research and enterprise General purpose General purpose
    How students get it Institutional licence (self-service tiers also exist) Institutional licence, via university sign-in Your university’s Microsoft 365 tenant Personal account, or a Google Workspace university
    Where data is stored AWS, Republic of Ireland Varies by tenant; UK institutions commonly on an EU data centre Your institution’s tenant Google infrastructure
    Typically permitted for research? Yes, often the mandated option Yes, where licensed Often, but frequently restricted by study level Institution-dependent; banned outright at some
    Question logic and piping Strong Strongest Basic Basic

    Start here: read your own university’s rule, not a general guide

    UK universities differ sharply on this, and the differences are not cosmetic. A few real examples, quoted from institutional guidance:

    • Solent University is prescriptive: staff and students collecting data via online surveys must use the University’s licence for Jisc Online Surveys, and it states that it will be considered a breach of ethical regulations if any other survey tool is used.
    • The University of Liverpool splits by study level and names tools to avoid: Microsoft Forms is recommended for undergraduate and postgraduate taught students, while Jisc Online Surveys licences go to research staff and postgraduate researchers. Its guidance places Google Forms and SurveyMonkey on a “do not use” list, stating they “are not suitable for research purposes nor do they meet data protection requirements”.
    • The University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences also splits by level, but the other way around — Qualtrics is available to undergraduates and postgraduate taught students, while its Online Surveys licence may be used by postgraduate taught but not undergraduate students. It states that SurveyMonkey, Google Surveys and other commercial survey tools are not supported for University work.
    • The University of St Andrews recommends Qualtrics, adds that Microsoft Forms via a University Office 365 account is acceptable, and requires you to check with its Data Protection team before using any other platform to process participants’ personal data.
    • The University of York, a Google Workspace institution, names Google Forms and Qualtrics as its two main survey tools — the opposite of Liverpool’s position.

    The lesson is blunt: a rule you read on a general study-skills site is worthless here. Liverpool bans the tool York recommends. Glasgow permits for postgraduates what it withholds from undergraduates. Find your own institution’s research data management or ethics page before you build anything.

    The correction most students need: Jisc Online Surveys is not UK-hosted

    Online Surveys, run by Jisc, is the closest thing UK higher education has to a default research survey platform, and it is often assumed to keep data in the UK. It does not. Its own security documentation states that all account and survey data is stored within Amazon Web Services in the Republic of Ireland, with backups stored securely within the EU.

    This is not a problem — it is simply a fact you should state accurately if your ethics application asks where data will be held. Ireland is in the European Economic Area, and the Information Commissioner’s Office confirms that all EEA countries have full UK adequacy, so the transfer is lawful. But writing “data will be stored in the UK” on your ethics form when it will sit in Dublin is an inaccuracy in a document you signed.

    One further correction worth knowing: Online Surveys is no longer institution-only. Jisc publishes self-service tiers, including a single-user option aimed at individuals conducting their own research. If your university does not hold a licence, the door is not necessarily closed — though check with your supervisor before paying for anything.

    A participant information sheet and consent form prepared for a student survey
    The platform is only half the compliance question — your information sheet and consent mechanism are the other half.

    What UK GDPR actually requires of you

    Your survey responses are personal data whenever they can be linked to an identifiable person — and that includes indirect identification through a combination of demographic answers, not just names and email addresses. A survey of a small department asking for age band, role and years of service can identify people even with no name field.

    The framework is the UK GDPR alongside the Data Protection Act 2018. Sending personal data outside the UK is a “restricted transfer” that needs a lawful route: UK adequacy regulations covering the destination, appropriate safeguards, or a specific exception. That is precisely why universities are prescriptive about platforms — the institutional licence has already resolved the transfer question, and a personal account has not.

    Note also that this area is moving. The ICO has flagged that its guidance on the research provisions is under review following changes made by the Data (Use and Access) Act, so a two-year-old handbook may be out of date. When it matters, ask your institution’s data protection team rather than relying on a document.

    The account rule students trip over

    Several universities require that a research survey be owned by a named individual institutional account, not a shared or generic one. The University of York states plainly that surveys require an individual owner and cannot be made with non-personal or shared accounts.

    The practical consequences: do not build your survey on a personal Gmail account; do not share one login across a project group; and be aware that if the platform is tied to your student account, your access — and your data — may end when your enrolment does. Export your responses well before you graduate.

    If your research involves the NHS, stop and read this

    There is a hard rule here that catches out nursing, midwifery, allied health and psychology students every year, and no survey platform will rescue you from it.

    The Health Research Authority states that standalone research at undergraduate level which requires ethics review and/or HRA and Health and Care Research Wales Approval cannot take place, and that applications from students working at undergraduate level are no longer being accepted for Research Ethics Committee review. “Standalone” means research the student designs, submits for approval and conducts on their own with supervision. Arrangements for doctoral research are unchanged, and master’s-level eligibility is conditional rather than open.

    Note that having a supervisor does not solve it. The HRA is clear that for undergraduate and master’s courses the supervisor should always take the role of chief investigator — and a standalone undergraduate project is still ineligible.

    The HRA does point to legitimate alternatives: research outside health and social care; health or social care research that does not involve patients, service users or NHS staff as participants; secondary research such as literature, scoping or systematic reviews; and group projects, which are eligible at any level provided the course leader or academic supervisor takes responsibility as chief investigator. If your project is heading towards NHS participants, redesign it early rather than late — and if a review-based project is the pragmatic pivot, our guide to choosing between a literature review and a systematic review sets out what each route demands.

    The recommendation

    1. Use whatever your university mandates. This overrides every other consideration on this page.
    2. Where you have a genuine choice and the survey collects personal data, prefer Jisc Online Surveys or Qualtrics. Both are built for research, both are covered by institutional agreements that have already answered the data protection questions, and both produce output your supervisor will recognise.
    3. Use Microsoft Forms via your institutional account for low-risk, non-sensitive surveys where your university permits it — it is widely available and sits inside your institution’s own tenant.
    4. Avoid personal-account Google Forms and SurveyMonkey for research involving personal data unless your institution explicitly supports them, as York does for Google Forms. Several universities name them as unsuitable.

    Get the sequence right

    Ethical approval comes before data collection, without exception. Institutional guidance is emphatic on this — the University of the West of England states that you cannot start collecting data until you have full ethical approval for that activity, and that its urgent route cannot be used to support retrospective approval. Data collected before approval is generally unusable, and no amount of good faith recovers it.

    So the order is: settle your design, calculate the number of participants you need, choose a permitted platform, get approval, then launch. Working out that number first matters, because it determines how long recruitment will take — our guide to sample size for an undergraduate dissertation covers how to arrive at a figure you can defend. Every one of these decisions then needs writing up and justifying, which is what the methodology chapter is for.

    If the fieldwork is done and the write-up is the bottleneck, you can draft your chapters in Tesify around your own approvals and your own data — 100% written by you.

    Frequently asked questions

    Can I use Google Forms for my dissertation survey?

    It depends entirely on your university. Some, such as York, name it as a supported tool. Others, such as Liverpool, state that it is not suitable for research purposes and does not meet data protection requirements. Check your own institution’s guidance — there is no UK-wide answer.

    Is Jisc Online Surveys free for students?

    Where your university holds a licence, you access it at no personal cost. There is no free public tier, though Jisc publishes self-service paid tiers including a single-user option and offers a trial period.

    Does an anonymous survey still count as personal data?

    Only if it is genuinely anonymous — meaning no one, including you, can re-identify a respondent. Surveys that collect no names but do collect a combination of demographic details from a small population are pseudonymous at best, and remain personal data under UK GDPR.

    Can I collect email addresses for a prize draw?

    Usually yes, with care. Keep the prize draw entry separate from the response data so the two cannot be linked, explain the arrangement in your participant information sheet, state how long you will keep the addresses, and delete them once the draw is done. Your ethics committee will want to see this described.

    What happens if I collected data before ethical approval?

    Tell your supervisor immediately. In most institutions that data cannot be used and retrospective approval is not available. It is far better to lose a fortnight of recruitment than to submit a dissertation built on data you were not authorised to collect.

    Do I need ethical approval for a survey of my own coursemates?

    Almost certainly yes. Approval requirements attach to research involving human participants, not to how well you know them. Recruiting friends and classmates also raises a specific issue your application should address: whether participants may feel pressured to take part.

    How long should I keep my survey data after submitting?

    Follow the retention period you stated in your ethics application and participant information sheet — that is a commitment you made to participants. If you did not specify one, ask your supervisor, and store the data in the institutional location your approval named rather than on a personal device.

  • SPSS vs R vs jamovi: Which Should You Use for a Social Science Dissertation in 2026?

    SPSS vs R vs jamovi: Which Should You Use for a Social Science Dissertation in 2026?

    Three packages dominate UK undergraduate social science dissertations. All three will run every test a typical project needs. The differences that actually matter are what happens to your access after graduation, how long you will spend learning before you produce a single result, and whether anyone can reproduce what you did.

    IBM SPSS Statistics jamovi R
    Cost to you Commercial; normally via a university site licence Free Free
    Licence Proprietary Open source (AGPL3; jmv analyses GPL2+) Open source (GPL-2 | GPL-3)
    Interface Point and click, with optional syntax Point and click, spreadsheet-style Code only (or via an editor such as RStudio)
    Time to first result Under an hour Under an hour Days to weeks
    Access after you graduate Usually lost with the site licence Keeps working Keeps working
    Reproducibility Good if you save syntax; poor if you only click Analyses re-run automatically when data changes Excellent — the script is the record
    Taught in UK departments Most widely Growing Common in economics, increasingly elsewhere
    Best for Following departmental teaching materials exactly Standard undergraduate analyses on any budget Anyone continuing to postgraduate or data work

    The shortlist, ranked

    1. jamovi — the best default for most undergraduates

    jamovi is free and open source, released under the AGPL3 with its analysis package jmv under GPL2+, and is built on top of the R statistical language. In practice it looks and behaves like a modern SPSS: a data spreadsheet, a menu of analyses, output that appears in a panel beside your data.

    Who it suits: anyone running the standard undergraduate set — t tests, ANOVA, correlation, regression, chi-square and the non-parametric equivalents — who wants results today and does not want to lose access to their own analysis after submission.

    Where it falls short: the analysis library is narrower than SPSS’s or R’s. Highly specialised procedures may not have a module, and community modules vary in maturity. If your supervisor has given you SPSS click-paths for a specific technique, translating them costs a little time.

    A genuine advantage worth knowing: jamovi re-runs your analyses automatically when the underlying data changes. If you discover a coding error in participant 43 at 11pm, you fix the cell and every table updates. In SPSS, a click-only workflow means redoing the analysis by hand and hoping you remember every option you set.

    2. SPSS — pick it when your department has built the course around it

    IBM SPSS Statistics, currently at version 32, is the package most UK psychology, sociology and education departments teach. It is commercial software; students normally reach it through an institutional site licence rather than buying it, and those licences are restricted to university members and to non-commercial use.

    Who it suits: students whose module materials, lab handouts and supervisor feedback are all written in SPSS. Fighting that is a poor use of your remaining weeks. If every worked example you have been given shows an SPSS dialog box, use SPSS.

    Where it falls short: two real risks. First, access is tied to your enrolment — students routinely discover over the summer, or after graduating, that they can no longer open their own analysis. Second, a click-only workflow leaves no record of what you did, which makes correcting an error late in the project genuinely painful.

    Mitigation: use the Paste button. Every dialog in SPSS can write its syntax to a file instead of running silently. Build a syntax file as you go and you get reproducibility roughly equivalent to R, plus a document you can include in an appendix.

    A laptop screen showing statistical output tables and charts during dissertation analysis
    Whichever package you choose, keep a record of the options you set — the output alone is not a method.

    3. R — the long game, if you have the time

    R is a free software environment for statistical computing maintained by the R Core Team, with copyright held by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing in Vienna. The current release is 4.6.1, published in June 2026.

    Who it suits: students heading for postgraduate study, research assistantships or any data-facing career; students in economics and quantitative geography where R is already the departmental norm; and anyone whose analysis needs something the point-and-click packages do not offer.

    Where it falls short: the learning curve is real and it arrives at exactly the wrong moment. Starting R from scratch six weeks before submission is a way to spend your remaining time debugging rather than analysing. Learn it before your final year, or alongside a package you already know.

    The compromise most people miss: because jamovi runs on R, you can work in jamovi’s interface and switch on syntax mode to see the equivalent R code for every analysis. That is a genuinely gentle on-ramp — you get your results now and learn the language from your own project.

    The recommendation

    Use jamovi unless your department has given you SPSS materials, in which case use SPSS and press Paste on every dialog. Learn R deliberately, in advance, rather than under deadline pressure.

    The reason to lead with jamovi is not ideological. It is that a free, open-source package removes the single most common statistics emergency in UK undergraduate dissertations — losing access to your analysis at the point you most need to revisit it.

    What none of them will do for you

    No package chooses your test. All three will happily run an independent-samples t test on repeated-measures data and return a confident-looking p value. The decision about which test your design calls for is made before you open the software, from your hypothesis type, your levels of measurement and your design — our guide to choosing the right statistical test works through that in order.

    Equally, none of them will tell you whether you recruited enough people. That is a power calculation you should have run before collecting data, and if you are writing it up retrospectively, the honest route is a sensitivity analysis — covered in our guide to sample size for an undergraduate dissertation.

    And whichever package produces your tables, your methodology chapter still has to name it, name the version, and justify the analysis strategy before the results appear. That is a writing job, not a software one, and it is set out in our guide to writing the methodology chapter.

    How to cite the software you used

    Name the package and the version in your methods chapter — “analyses were conducted in jamovi 2.7” — and include a formal citation if your handbook asks for one. jamovi asks to be cited as The jamovi project (2026). jamovi (Version 2.7) [Computer Software], retrieved from its website. R has a standard citation available from within the software itself. For SPSS, cite IBM and the version number.

    Markers notice when a version number is missing, because it is the difference between a reproducible method and a vague one.

    Once your analysis is done, the results chapter still has to explain what the numbers mean. If that is where you are stuck, you can draft it in Tesify from your own output — your data, your interpretation, 100% written by you.

    Frequently asked questions

    Is jamovi accepted by UK universities for dissertations?

    Yes. It is legitimate, citable statistical software and produces standard output. Your department cares that the analysis is correct and properly reported, not which menu you clicked. If in doubt, tell your supervisor which package you are using before you start.

    Will I lose access to SPSS after I graduate?

    Usually, yes — university site licences are restricted to current members of the institution. If you expect to revisit your analysis after graduating, either work in a free package or export your data and syntax before your account closes.

    Can I switch packages halfway through my analysis?

    You can, and it is sometimes the right call, but re-run everything in the new package rather than mixing outputs. Two packages can produce slightly different values for the same test because of differing defaults, and an unexplained inconsistency in your results chapter invites questions.

    Do I need to learn R to get a good mark?

    No. Marks come from a defensible design, a correct analysis and a clear interpretation. R is a career investment, not a marking criterion.

    What about Excel?

    Fine for data entry and simple descriptives, and genuinely useful for cleaning. It is a poor choice for inferential statistics: the tests available are limited, the output is not in a reportable format, and it does not record what you did. Enter data in Excel by all means, then analyse elsewhere.

    Is JASP worth considering as well?

    Yes, if you want Bayesian analyses alongside conventional ones. JASP is free, open source and supported by the University of Amsterdam, and it sits in much the same niche as jamovi. If your project has no Bayesian component, either is a sound choice — pick the one your supervisor can help with.

    Does my university’s site licence let me install SPSS on my own laptop?

    Usually yes, for the duration of your enrolment and for non-commercial academic use only. Check your IT services pages for the exact terms, since they vary by institution and are enforced.

    Which package should I use if my data are qualitative?

    None of these three. SPSS, jamovi and R are built for numerical analysis. Interview transcripts and open-text responses are coded in qualitative analysis software, or perfectly respectably by hand with a spreadsheet and a clear coding frame. Using a statistics package to count word frequencies in interview data is not thematic analysis, and markers will say so.

    My supervisor uses Stata. Should I switch to that?

    Only if your department teaches it and can support you. Stata is common in economics, public health and some social policy departments, and where it is the local norm the same logic applies as with SPSS: use what your supervisor can help you debug. What matters is that you can explain and reproduce your analysis, not which package produced the table.

    Do I need to include my raw output in an appendix?

    Check your handbook, as practice varies. Where it is required, include the syntax or script rather than screenshots of every dialog box — it is shorter, it is searchable, and it demonstrates that your analysis was planned rather than clicked together.