Questionnaires are an integral element of research, allowing us to collect data that can help uncover some of the most obscure information about people. However, they do have their limitations.
Questions can be self-administered, with participants answering all questions themselves, or researcher-administered, where the research team interviews a sample of respondents by phone, in-person, or online. Self-administered questionnaires tend to have lower response rates than researcher-administered questionnaires, due in part to the impersonal nature of mailed paper surveys and automated telephone menu systems.
Web-based surveys offer a range of advantages, including a wider audience than traditional surveys that are conducted via mail or phone and the ability to reach an international audience. They also pose difficulties, including the difficulty of reaching a representative demographic sample. Additionally, they are affected by issues such as screen size, operating system, hardware platform and browser settings that can affect responses.
When you design a survey it is crucial to think about the research goals and the goals. When you’re creating questions, it’s important to know the target audience. For example you should know whether they understand and respond in a way that is understandable or whether they have the time to complete a long questionnaire.
To ensure that new questionnaires are working as intended, it’s important to test them in advance using qualitative methods, such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. The questionnaires are subject to “question-order effects” where the answers to earlier questions can influence the answers to later ones.
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