You may know that Pitt is a top-rated research university, but did you know that all students, faculty, and staff have access to a high-powered research tool? Qualtrics lets anyone in the Pitt community create high-quality surveys in a secure, research-friendly environment.
For times when you need a little (or a lot) more power, here’s how Qualtrics can help you make better surveys.
🏗️ Your Survey Building Blocks
Qualtrics is built for serious data collection, but it’s versatile and user-friendly enough for a wide variety of tasks.
Every Qualtrics survey is organized into Blocks — groups of questions that you can arrange, randomize, or route respondents through based on their answers. Blocks are the foundation that unlocks Qualtrics’ most powerful features. Display Logic shows or hides individual questions based on how a respondent answered earlier. Branch Logic goes further, sending different groups of respondents down entirely different paths — so students and faculty, for example, can take the same survey and each see only the questions relevant to them.
Beyond logic, Qualtrics offers a wide range of question types that go well beyond multiple-choice: matrix tables (grid-style questions with shared answer sales), rank order, sliders, and open-ended text fields with validation to keep your data clean. Plus, Qualtrics can even help you generate response options related to your questions.
When you use Qualtrics through Pitt, you also have access to branded templates in Look and Feel. Pitt’s general template is classic blue and gold, but there are plenty of department-level templates available to suit your needs.
When your responses are in, built-in reporting tools let you visualize and export results without ever leaving the platform. And because your survey is tied directly to your Pitt credentials, your data is protected by the same security standards that cover all Pitt systems.
📝 When to Use Qualtrics
Survey needs vary, and familiar tools like Microsoft and Google Forms can work well to gather simple feedback. But if you’re looking for a little extra oomph, Qualtrics has you covered.
🔬 When Your Work Requires Research-Grade Tools
Qualtrics is used by professional researchers and institutions worldwide. That’s because it takes data collection seriously.
For anyone conducting a research survey, confidentiality can be important. Qualtrics gives you precise control over anonymity and confidentiality, so you can ensure that participant identities aren’t tied to their responses. Find these settings by navigating to Survey options > Security in your survey draft.
If your research needs to reach participants beyond English-speaking audiences, Qualtrics supports multilingual surveys. You can build a single survey and offer it in multiple languages, giving you access to a broader and more representative group of participants without managing separate versions of the same survey.
🗳️ When You’re Coordinating Across a Large Group
For complex, multi-stakeholder decisions like event planning or group coordination, a well-built survey can turn chaos into clarity.
Qualtrics makes it easy for multiple people to build a survey together. Collaborate lets you share your survey project with teammates, so the whole planning committee can weigh in on the questions before anything goes live, without emailing draft versions back and forth. Everyone works in the same place, and you always know you're looking at the most current version.
Quotas are useful when your survey needs built-in limits. For example, if you’re planning an event with capped attendance, you can set a quota so that once a session or option hits its limit, it automatically closes to new responses.
📋 When a Basic Form Just Isn’t Enough
A typical survey can get out of hand quickly. Coordinating a department-wide event, conducting an institutional survey, or managing a community effort can be sneakily labor intensive.
Qualtrics’ ExpertReview feature acts as a built-in quality check before your survey ever goes live. It automatically scans your survey for common design problems and flags them for you to review. Think of it as a second set of eyes that catches the kinds of things that are easy to miss when you've been staring at the same survey for too long.
Once your survey is ready, personalized email distributions let you send targeted invitations directly to your respondent list, with automatic reminders built in for anyone who hasn’t responded yet. You control the timing, the message, and the follow-up cadence.
🚀 Start Building
Whether you're rallying your organization, conducting research, or managing a large-scale outreach effort, Qualtrics gives you the tools to collect better data and make better decisions. Search for Qualtrics at myPitt (my.pitt.edu) and click Create a new project to get started.
For even more details, check out Getting Started with Qualtrics for our step-by-step guide if you need a hand along the way.
— Pitt Digital
