Introduction

QANS (Questionnaire And Nomination Software) is a collection of software components to enable longitudinal research using sociometric (peer nomination, peer ranking) surveys. This includes a personal-data subsystem, extensions/plugins to the online survey tool LimeSurvey, and an exporter for the answer data generated by LimeSurvey.

Sociometric surveys are a standard and reliable method for assessing behaviors, relationships, status, and social networks within groups (e.g., classrooms, work units). In sociometric survey methodology, participants choose, vote for, or nominate others in response to specific questions. This makes sociometric survey methodology unique, and the collection of peer nominations cannot be handled by “ordinary” survey software.

The QANS software is built to plan, prepare and administer a special kind of personalized questionnaires, where a respondent is asked to answer questions about other respondents that belong to the same, so called, reference group. As respondents are linked to the responses from others, it is possible to create, analyze and compare social networks for each of these questions. The specific use case in QANS focuses on bullying and social dynamics in general in Dutch schools. The core focus of the project was on the academic research that the Behavioral Science Institute of the Radboud University does on the social dynamics of classes of teenagers in high school. This by itself is done to increase the safety of teenagers, e.g. by informing policy makers and schools. However, as Dutch law stipulates that schools must monitor bullying behavior within the school, a core feature of the resulting software is to provides for the automated generation of reports for the school to aid them in monitoring, evaluation and even interventions to stop toxic behavior.