Questionnaires play a crucial role in research. They enable us to gather data that can reveal hidden insights about individuals. 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, like the ability to reach a wider audience than traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the ability to reach a wider audience. However, they also come with issues, such as the difficulty in reaching a representative sample of the population. They can also be affected by issues such as screen size as well as hardware platform, operating system and browser settings that can influence responses.
When you design a survey it is essential to consider the research goals and objectives. It’s also essential to know your audience when creating questions such as whether they can comprehend and answer the questions in the language you’re using or if they’ve got the time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test new questionnaires before they are released with qualitative methods such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting (often using an opt-in survey) to ensure they’re functioning according to their intended purpose. In addition, questionnaires are susceptible to “question order effects” in which responses to questions from earlier ones can alter the answers to later ones.
