Questionnaires play an essential role in research. They let us 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 questionnaires provide a host of advantages, such as the ability to reach a wider audience than traditional telephone or mail-based surveys and the capacity click to read to reach a wider audience. They can also present some difficulties, including the difficulty of reaching a representative demographic sample. They are also affected by factors such as screen dimensions and hardware platforms, operating systems, and browser settings.
When creating a questionnaire it’s important to carefully consider the research aims and objectives. It’s also essential to know your audience when creating questions for them, like whether they are able to comprehend and respond to the questions you ask them in the language you choose, or if they have enough time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that new questionnaires are working as intended, it is important to test them in advance with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Questionnaires are susceptible to “question-order effects”, where answers to earlier questions may influence the answers to subsequent ones.