Questionnaires play an essential role in research. They allow us to gather data that can reveal hidden information about people. However, they 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 surveys have many advantages, including a wider audience than traditional surveys that are conducted via mail or phone and the possibility of reaching an international audience. They also pose difficulties, including the difficulty of reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be affected by issues such as screen dimensions and platforms for hardware, operating systems, and browser settings.
When creating a questionnaire it’s important to carefully consider the research’s goals and objectives. It is also crucial to consider your audience when creating questions that ask if they can comprehend and answer the questions in the language you’re using, or if they have time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that new questionnaires work as they are intended, it’s crucial to test them before hand with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviewing or pretesting. Questions are susceptible to “question-order effects” which means that answers to earlier questions may influence the answers to later ones.