Questionnaires are a vital element of research that allows us to collect data that can help uncover some of the most obscure information about individuals. But they do have 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, such as the ability to reach a wider audience than traditional telephone or mail-based surveys and the capability to reach a wider audience. They also have some challenges, including the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They are also affected by issues such as screen sizes, hardware platforms, operating systems, and browser settings.
When you design a survey it is important to consider the research goals and objectives. When creating questions, it’s important to know your audience. For example you must know if they can understand and respond to the questions or whether they have time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires are functioning as intended, it’s important to test them prior to use with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Questions are susceptible to “question-order effects” where the answers to earlier questions could influence the answers to later ones.