A questionnaire can be interesting and worth if you dedicate awards for participants. Developing questionnaires often rely on surveys and programs; so, it is close to the scientific approach.

5 steps to good questionnaire design

#1: Identify your research aims and the goal of your questionnaire

What kind of information do you want to gather with your questionnaire? What is your main objective?

Ideally, there are already existing questionnaires with published results on the validity and statistical evaluation of all tested questions that you can use (or steal a couple of ideas from).

While this is quite common in academic research, it might be rather hard to reuse existing questionnaires for commercial applications. In this case, you might have to scan papers and internal reports for key metrics of interest and create a questionnaire that specifically addresses these aspects.

#2: Define your target respondents

Clearly, you can’t test everyone – it’s rather plausible that there have to be certain restrictions with respect to the target audience of your questionnaire. The selection of groups is a key factor for maximizing the outcomes of your study.

To put it another way: You can run multiple questionnaire sessions over a longer period of time with a single group (longitudinal design), or you can present your questionnaire once to two or more groups (cross-sectional design).

While the former allows you to analyze how the questionnaire results of the group change over time, the latter delivers insights into differences among groups.

#3: Develop questions

Smart questions are the linchpin of every questionnaire. To make them work, they have to be phrased in a way that prevents any misunderstandings or ambiguities.

Quite frankly, it’s a lost cause trying to analyze data from a questionnaire where people seemed to be confused either mixing things up, selecting incorrect answers or not being able to read or understand the questions at all.

It makes a significant difference whether you want to hand a questionnaire to children, adults or elderly respondents. You certainly do well to consider the cognitive, attentional, and sensory competencies of your target group – handing out long questionnaires with a huge amount of questions in small letter print and complicated phrasing might be information (and visual) overkill for any respondent group.

#4: Choose your question type

There’s a wide variety in how to phrase questions. In explorative questionnaires, you will find mainly open questions, where respondents can fill in any answer (this makes sense whenever you try to gain an understanding of the topics associated with your research question).

By contrast, quantitative questionnaires primarily include closed-questions, which have been predefined by the researcher either in form of multiple choice answers or rating scales.

Here’s one example:

Open question: “What did you like about the webinar?”

Closed question:“The webinar was useful.”

[  ] strongly agree

[  ] Agree

[  ] Cannot decide

[  ] Disagree

[  ] Strongly disagree

You get the drift.

As is usually the case, both types of questions have benefits and drawbacks that are worth considering in order to come up with a solid questionnaire design that does the trick for you.

Besides open and closed-format questions, there are several other types of question you can sprinkle into your questionnaire. Stay tuned for next week’s post as we will shed light on the different categories and their characteristics so you know exactly when and how to use them.

#5:  Design question sequence and overall layout

After optimizing each question separately it is time to improve the overall flow and layout of the questionnaire.

Are there transitions from one question to the next? Are follow-up questions placed correctly? Are skip-rules implemented so that respondents can skip questions that do not apply to them?

https://imotions.com/blog/design-a-questionnaire/

BR.

I had a colleague who like me was inundated with questionnaires respond to on a daily basis. He developed a long questionnaire for the sender to complete about their research, methods, objectives and so . He would send this and say he would fill in theirs once they had filled in his. No one ever did.

the fundamental problem in my view is give the responder some interest and hopefully stake in the business.

A questionaire is far too often the first method students think of whereas it should be the last resort. You are really askin a lot of people who are busy to spend time doing your research for you and getting nothing out of it themselves. It’s a very blunt and largely unreliable tool.

In my opinion, it's important to make sure that participants can finish your questionnaire in five minutes, cos a long questionnaire may make people feel boring.

To make a good questionnaire is certainly a science. Generations of sociologistasand psychlogists have done a lot of research on this topic. Depending from how you pose the quaestion an answer might be preprogrammed in a certain direction.

So, if you plan to make a reprensentative study with a questionnaire get advice from an expert. One can make many mistakes which make the result worthless otherwise.

Although the questionnaire in itself it's certainly based on a science, involving a touch of art will probably make it more appealing, and perhaps more likely to be answered. So, good luck with the combination!

Use science to make up the questions with a touch of art to make them attractive.

Outline your objectives you are trying to achieve and make the questions to help you in your endeavour. Limit the questions to make it more likely to be filled in rather than abandoned (if it is too long).

A questionnaire can be interesting and worth if you dedicate awards for participants. Developing questionnaires often rely on surveys and programs; so, it is close to the scientific approach.

The following publications may further help:

• Bradburn, N. M., Sudman, S. and Wansink, B. (2004) Asking Questions: The Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design For Market Research, Political Polls, and Social and Health Questionnaires. Revised edn. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Krosnick, J. A. and Presser, S. (2010) Question and Questionnaire Design, in Marsden, P.V. and Wright, J.D. (eds.) Handbook of Survey Research. Second ed. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 263-313.
• Lietz, P. (2010) Research into questionnaire design, International Journal of Market Research, 52, 2, pp. 249-272.
• Malhotra, N. K. (2006) Questionnaire Design and Scale Development, in Grover, R. and Vriens, M. (eds.) The Handbook of Marketing Research: Uses, Misuses, and Future Advances. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc., pp. 83-94.
• Platek, R. (1985) Some important issues in questionnaire development, Journal of official statistics, 1, 2, pp. 119-136.
• Rattray, J. and Jones, M. C. (2007) Essential elements of questionnaire design and development, Journal of clinical nursing, 16, 2, pp. 234-243.
• Rowley, J. (2014) Designing and using research questionnaires, Management Research Review, 37, 3, pp. 308-330.