Questionnaires are an integral part of research that allows us to collect data that can reveal undiscovered insights 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 internet-based.org/business-with-virtual-boardroom 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, like more reach over traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the capability to reach a wide audience. However, they also come with problems, like the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They are also subject to issues like screen size and the operating system, hardware platform and browser settings that could influence responses.
When creating a questionnaire it is important to think about the research aims and objectives. It’s also essential to know the people who will be answering your questions for them, like whether they can comprehend and respond to the questions in the language you’re using, or if they have enough time to complete an extensive questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires are working as intended, it is important to test them prior to use using qualitative methods such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Finally, questionnaires can be susceptible to “question order effects” where answers to earlier questions could affect the answers to subsequent questions.