The following training materials and other resources may serve to facilitate and encourage research by students, faculty and staff.

Title / Author Flash PDF ODP PPT
Non-Experimental Research: Overview of Conducting Surveys
Michael Karchmer, Ph.D. - April 2001 (for EDF811)		 icon for Flash swf file Adobe PDF icon ODP file icon PPT file icon
Writing Good Survey Questions
Michael Karchmer, Ph.D. - April 2001 (for EDF811)		 Flash swf icon Adobe PDF icon ODP file icon PPT icon

Tips on Writing Research Proposals

In-house Software Packages Offered to Faculty, Staff and Students

REDCap is a web application that facilitates the collection of data for a variety of research projects. It is produced, distributed, and supported by Vanderbilt University in collaboration with a consortium of over 900 institutional partners in over 70 countries. It is a proven and capable tool that has been used by over 24,000 researchers worldwide to collect data for their projects.

Software Packages

There are quite a large number of software packages well-suited to the needs of researchers and students, many available at no cost and unencumbered by proprietary licensing restrictions. A small list of some of the more well-known packages follows below:

Free to Use But Restricted Packages

  • REDCap is a web application that facilitates the collection of data for a variety of research projects via either direct data entry or surveys. It is produced, distributed, and supported by Vanderbilt University in collaboration with a consortium of over 900 institutional partners in over 70 countries. It is a proven and capable tool that has been used by over 24,000 researchers worldwide to collect data for their projects.

Free / Open Source Software (FOSS) Packages

  • AnSWR is a software system for coordinating and conducting large-scale, team-based analysis projects that integrate qualitative and quantitative techniques, developed by the Centers for Disease Control
  • Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT) is a web-based qualitative data analysis service for textual data developed and hosted by the University Center for Social and Urban Research, at the University of Pittsburgh, and QDAP-UMass, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool for digital video and audio data developed by the Language Archiving Technology (LAT) Technical Group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of language, sign language, and gesture.
  • Google Forms is an application which allows users to develop simple surveys, and is available as part of Gallaudet's suite of Google services. To get started with it, users should login to their e-mail on the web. Then choose Documents from the menu above the Gallaudet logo, and in the new window, select Create /  Form.
  • LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an Open Source web application to develop, publish and collect responses to online and offline surveys. The LimeSurvey folks offer to host your surveys on their system, or you can download and install the software on your own web server.
  • Maxima is a powerful Computer Algebra System (CAS) competing with Maple and Mathematica. It was maintained by William Schelter at the University of Texas, Austin. It is now maintained by volunteers. It lacks a good graphical user interface (GUI) front end.
  • Octave (a.k.a. GNU Octave) is a "MATLAB like" package developed by John W. Eaton (University of Wisconsin) and many others. See also: GUI Octave which is an attempt to provide a more user-friendly interface to Octave.
  • Praat (also the Dutch word for "talk") is a free scientific software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics. It has been designed and continuously developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. The program also supports speech synthesis, including articulatory synthesis.
  • PSPP (a.k.a. GNU PSPP) is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a Free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.
  • PsyScope X is a program to design and run psychological experiments, used by many experimental labs, initially developed at Carnegie Mellon by Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney and Jefferson Provost and now being developed by the SISSA Language, Cognition and Development Lab at Sissa, the RICO group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and many volunteers.
  • The R Project for Statistical Computing. See also: R Commander, which is a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) add-on / plugin to R.
  • Transana is a system for the qualitative analysis of digital video and audio, developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Education Research

Commercial / Proprietary Software Packages

  • Atlas.ti is a software package used mostly, but not exclusively, in qualitative research or qualitative multimedia data analysis.
  • HyperRESEARCH is a software package used for conducting qualitative research or qualitative data analysis.
  • Maple is a general-purpose commercial computer algebra system. It was first developed in 1980 by the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), and has since gone commercial.
  • Mathematica is computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing.
  • MATLAB is a numerical computing environment with a particular ability to work with matrices. Initially developed by Cleve Moler at University of New Mexico and has since gone commercial.
  • PsychData is also a hosted survey service. A bit more pricey, but it is specifically aimed at accommodating psychologists and social scientists.
  • SPSS is the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, currently sold through IBM. (Note: SPSS is available to students in select Gallaudet University computer labs)
  • Survey Monkey is a popular hosted survey company.

Other Resources

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