Questionnaires play an important role in research. They help us gather data that can reveal hidden information about people. 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 variety of advantages, including broader reach than traditional mail or phone-based surveys and the capacity to engage a global audience. They can also present some challenges, including the difficulty of reaching a representative sample of the population. They are also affected by issues such as screen dimensions, hardware platforms operating systems, browser settings.
When you design a questionnaire it is important to think about the research goals and objectives. When creating questions, it is crucial to understand the people who will be using your questionnaire. For instance you should know whether they can comprehend and respond to the question or whether they have the time to complete a long questionnaire.
It is also crucial to test new questionnaires before they are released by using qualitative methods, such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or testing them in the pretesting phase (often using an opt-in questionnaire) to ensure they are working in the way they were intended to. Questionnaires are susceptible to “question-order effects” which means that answers to questions from earlier ones can influence the answers to later ones.
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