Questionnaires play a vital role in research. They enable us to collect data which could 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 have a variety of advantages, including more reach than traditional mail or phone-based surveys and the ability to reach a wider audience. They also pose difficulties, including the difficulty in reaching a representative sample of the population. They can also be susceptible to issues like screen size, operating system, hardware platform, and browser settings, which could affect the response.
When designing a questionnaire, it is essential to consider the research goals and objectives. When designing questions it is crucial to understand your audience. For example it is important to determine whether they can comprehend and answer the language or do they have the time to finish a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires work as they are intended, it’s essential to test them before hand by using qualitative methods such as focus groups, cognitive interviewing, or pretesting. Questions are susceptible to “question-order effects” which means that answers to earlier questions may influence the answers to later ones.