Designing form for a long survey, can't wrap my mind around proper Normalization

[EvanRosenlieb]

Hello all,

I am designing a form for a very long survey (70 questions) for a research project. Most questions are multiple choice in the form of "Strongly Disagree --> Strongly Agree" or other things like that. The main reason we are using Access is for the form capabilities as opposed to the RDBM capabilities. The form is going just fine, but I am unsure about whether I am storing it correctly on the back end. I understand that in normal databases the tables should be "long and skinny" in a general sense. However, I am unsure how that applies to this situation. It seems like this long survey sort of naturally applies itself to being stored in one, big flat file with 70 fields. There are not, seemingly to me, natural parent/child relationships and if I split the table up into smaller ones it seems like I would just be joining them up by one to one relationships on the SurveyID field.

Am I way off base here?

Thanks!

--Evan

[June7]

Conventional relational database structure would be like:

tblQuestions
QuestionID (PK)
Question

tblSurveys
SurveyID (PK)
SurveyDate
Respondent

tblAnswers
SurveyID (FK)
QuestionID (FK)
Answer

[EvanRosenlieb]

Thanks June,

Would you have a table for each different format of questions? Most are ones that can be stored as a number with a look up on the form, like the type that I described. However there are others that require text string or date formats. So should there be three table for answers in that case, one that has an integer answer field, one that has a text answer field, and one that has a date answer field?

--Evan

[June7]

I would not break up the responses to multiple tables. The approach I suggest would require all responses to be saved as text.

I've never built this kind of db. Search the forum: questionnaire survey database

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