Get Supervisor Sign-Off Before Fieldwork

Andrzej Szymkowiak · Last reviewed July 2026

A supervisor who reads your questionnaire after the data is in will still find the missing item, the double-barreled question, or the scale with only two items — but by then it is too late to fix. The fix is simple: get your supervisor's sign-off before fieldwork starts. This guide covers what an advisor should check before launch, why a review beats repairing data later, and how to share a study for read-only review without giving up control of it.

Why review before fieldwork, not after

Once a survey is live and respondents have answered, the instrument is frozen. You cannot add the construct you forgot, reword a confusing item, or insert an attention check without breaking comparability with the responses you already paid for. If a reviewer flags a real problem after collection, your options are bad: drop the affected items, caveat the limitation in your paper, or re-collect — which costs money and weeks.

A pre-launch review turns those expensive, late surprises into cheap, early edits. It is the same logic as preregistration: decide and check the design before the data exists, when changes are free (Nosek et al., 2018). For a student, a supervisor's sign-off is also a shared decision — if the design was approved, a weak result is a finding about the world, not a mistake in the instrument.

What a supervisor should check before you launch

A good pre-launch review is concrete. These are the questions an advisor (or a second reader) should be able to answer "yes" to:

• Constructs and hypotheses. Does every hypothesis have a measure? Is each construct defined before its items were written? See from research question to questionnaire.
• Validated scales. Are the measures drawn from published, validated scales rather than written from scratch, with at least three items per reflective construct? See how to find a validated scale.
• Item wording. No double-barreled, leading, or ambiguous items; reverse-coded items flagged so they are recoded before analysis. See how to write good survey questions.
• Response options. The right scale type and number of points, labelled clearly, consistent across blocks.
• Data quality controls. Attention checks, screen-out questions, and any quotas in place — easier to add now than to defend their absence later.
• Sample size. A target justified by an a-priori power analysis or a model-based rule, not a round number, with dropout built in. See how many participants do you need and the sample-size method.
• Ethics and consent. Consent screen, data-handling statement, and any IRB/ethics approval reflected in the survey.
• A pilot. A small soft launch to catch wording and routing problems the eye misses on screen.

Hand your supervisor this list. A review against a checklist is faster for them and far more useful to you than "have a look when you get a chance."

How to run the review in Explonia

Explonia has a built-in role for exactly this. On the Academic tier and above, you can invite one external study supervisor (advisor or reviewer) per study. They get a read-only view of:

• the full questionnaire — every section and question, as built;
• the respondent preview — the survey exactly as a participant will see it, so they can click through it;
• the fieldwork statistics — response count, completion rate, and average completion time once collection starts.

The guest cannot edit anything and does not see your analyses — the review is about the instrument and the fieldwork, not your results. They accept an emailed invitation and use a free account; you stay the owner and make every change yourself. It is the fastest way to get a real sign-off: your supervisor sees the actual survey, not a PDF export that has already drifted from what you built.

This pairs naturally with a pilot: invite your supervisor, run a small pilot, let them click through the respondent preview and watch the first responses arrive, then make any edits and launch the full study.

Pilot first, then launch

Even with a sign-off, run a short pilot before full fieldwork. A pilot surfaces problems that no static review catches: a routing rule that skips a section, a matrix that is unreadable on a phone, a question respondents consistently misread. Fix what the pilot shows, get a final nod, and only then open the study to your full sample. You can preview the survey on desktop and mobile before anyone sees it — browse worked examples → to see how a study looks end to end.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Launching to your full sample before anyone with methods experience has read the survey.
• Treating the supervisor invite as edit access — it is read-only; you make the changes after the discussion.
• Expecting the reviewer to see your analyses — the guest role covers the instrument and fieldwork, not results.
• Sending a PDF or screenshots instead of the live survey, so the reviewer checks a version that no longer matches the build.
• Skipping the pilot because the design was approved on paper.
• Leaving attention checks, screen-outs, and consent until "later" — later is after the data is in.

Frequently asked questions

References

Nosek, B. A., Ebersole, C. R., DeHaven, A. C., & Mellor, D. T. (2018). The preregistration revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(11), 2600–2606.

Presser, S., Couper, M. P., Lessler, J. T., Martin, E., Martin, J., Rothgeb, J. M., & Singer, E. (2004). Methods for testing and evaluating survey questions. Public Opinion Quarterly, 68(1), 109–130.

How Explonia does this for you

Explonia is built for the full quantitative research workflow — build the survey, get it reviewed, collect the data, and run the analysis in one place. Before launch, you invite a supervisor or reviewer to a read-only view of the questionnaire and the respondent preview (Academic tier and above); during fieldwork they can watch completion in real time. When the data is in, you run reliability, CFA and the rest, and the "Article description" feature drafts an APA results paragraph with your own numbers, which you edit and keep — you stay the author throughout. See how to plan your sample first → or turn a research question into a questionnaire →.

Ready to get sign-off before you launch? Build your survey in Explonia, share it with your supervisor, and collect data once it is approved. Start free →