Questionnaires are an essential element of research, allowing us to collect data that can reveal undiscovered insights 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 questionnaires provide a host of advantages, including broader reach than traditional mail or phone-based surveys and the ability to reach a wider audience. However, they also come with difficulties, including the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be susceptible to issues like screen size and the hardware platform, operating system and browser settings, which could influence the responses.
When creating a survey, it is crucial to think about the research goals and objectives. It’s also essential to know the audience you’re asking such as whether they are able to comprehend and answer the questions you have asked them to answer, or if they have time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires are functioning as intended, it’s essential to test them before hand with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Questionnaires are susceptible to “question-order effects” in which answers to questions from earlier ones can influence the answers to later ones.