9 October 2024
Questionnaires play an essential role in research. They enable us to collect data which can reveal hidden insights about individuals. 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 questionnaires have a variety of advantages, such as more reach over traditional phone or mail-based surveys, and the ability to include a global audience. They also pose issues, such as the difficulty of reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be subject to issues such as screen size and hardware platform, operating system, and browser settings that may affect responses.
When you design a questionnaire it is important to think about the research’s goals and objectives. When you’re creating questions, it is crucial to understand your target audience. For example, you need to know whether they understand and respond in a way that is understandable or do they have the time to finish a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test the new questionnaires ahead of time by using qualitative methods, such as focus groups or cognitive interviews, or testing them in the pretesting phase (often by using an opt-in form of survey) to ensure that they are working in the way they were intended to. Questionnaires are prone to “question-order effects” where the answers to questions from earlier ones can influence the answers to later ones.