A questionnaire is a type of research instrument that asks questions in a standard format to gather responses from respondents. Responses to questions (items) on the questionnaire can be combined into a composite scale or index to allow statistical analysis. Many types of research use questionnaires, such as academic research and market research.
When creating your survey, it is crucial to consider the people you’re targeting. Questions should be simple and clear without the use of jargon that is difficult for non-experts to interpret. It is also important to keep the length of the survey short. People don’t like long surveys, and the longer a survey is longer, the lower the response rate will be.
Web experiments are an online research method that uses a browser-based interface such as websites or mobile applications. The advantages of this approach include the possibility of creating personal and interactive experiments, the capability to track user behavior, and the possibility of using conditional branching based upon previous answers given by the participant.
The drawbacks of web-based experiments include the lack of a control group which could result in unintentional confounding and poor generalization. Additionally, it can be difficult to evaluate the results of a web-based experiment because of its interactive nature.
It is also essential to practice the questionnaire, in the case of a convenience sampling, before distributing it in the field. This will enable you to discern ambiguity, unclear language or biases in questions, and eliminate them before administering the questionnaire to your targeted population.