Questionnaires play a crucial role in research. They help us gather data that can reveal hidden information about individuals. 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 questionnaires offer a variety of advantages, including a wider reach than surveys that are conducted by telephone or mail and the possibility of reaching an international audience. They can also present some issues, such as the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. Additionally, they are subject to issues like screen size and operating system, hardware platform and browser settings that may influence responses.
When creating a questionnaire, it’s important to carefully consider the research aims and objectives. When designing questions it is crucial to understand your audience. For example you must know whether they can comprehend and respond to the questions or if they have the time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires function as intended, it is important to test them before hand with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviewing or pretesting. Additionally, questionnaires are susceptible to “question order effects” where responses to questions from earlier ones can alter the answers to questions that follow.
internet-based.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-questionnaires/