Questionnaires are a vital element of research that allows us to collect data that will allow us to discover undiscovered insights about individuals. However, they are not without 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 offer a variety of advantages, including a larger audience than traditional surveys conducted via telephone or mail and the ability to include an international audience. But they can also pose several challenges like the difficulty of reaching a representative sample. They can also be affected by issues like screen sizes as well as hardware platforms operating systems, browser settings.
When designing a questionnaire, it is important to think about the research goals and the goals. When creating questions, it is crucial to understand your audience. For instance, you need to know whether they understand and answer the language or whether they have time to finish a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires work as they are intended, it is important to test them beforehand using qualitative methods, such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. In addition, questionnaires are susceptible to “question order effects” where answers to earlier questions may affect the answers to later ones.