Questionnaires are a crucial part of research, allowing us to collect information that will help us uncover undiscovered 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 number advantages, including a larger reach than surveys conducted by mail or telephone and the ability to engage an international audience. They also pose issues, such as the difficulty of reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be subject to issues like screen size and the hardware platform, operating system and browser settings that may influence the responses.
When designing a questionnaire, it is crucial to think about the research goals and objectives. When designing questions it’s essential to know the target audience. For instance you must know whether they can comprehend and respond in a way that is understandable or if they have the time to fill out a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that new questionnaires work as they are intended, it is important to test them before hand using qualitative methods such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. In addition, questionnaires are susceptible to «question order effects» in which responses to earlier questions can affect the answers to questions that follow.
