Questionnaires are a crucial element of research, allowing us to collect data that will allow us to discover undiscovered insights about people. However, they aren’t without 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 larger audience than traditional surveys conducted via telephone or mail and the ability to reach an international audience. However, they also come with difficulties, including the difficulty in reaching a representative sample of the population. They can also be affected by issues such as screen size and hardware platform, operating system, and browser settings that could influence responses.
When creating a questionnaire it is crucial to consider the research’s goals and objectives. When creating questions, it’s important to know the people who will be using your questionnaire. For instance, you need to know if they can understand and respond to the questions or do they have the time to complete a long questionnaire.
It’s also essential to test the new questionnaires ahead of time by using qualitative methods, such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or testing them in the pretesting phase (often with an opt-in survey) to ensure they’re performing in the way they were intended to. Questions are susceptible to “question-order effects” where the answers to earlier questions may influence the answers to later ones.