Questionnaires are a crucial part of research and allow us to gather data that can help uncover some of the most obscure information about people. But they’re not 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 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 greater reach over traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the capacity to reach a wider audience. However, they do pose some issues for example, the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be affected by factors such as screen sizes and platforms for hardware, operating systems, and browser settings.
When you design a questionnaire it’s important to carefully consider the research goals and objectives. It’s also important to consider your target audience when designing questions that ask if they can comprehend and respond to the language you use or if they’ve got the enough time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test new questionnaires ahead of time through qualitative methods like focus groups and cognitive interviews or pre-testing (often by using an opt-in form of survey) to ensure that they’re performing according to their intended purpose. Questions are internet-based.org/internet-polls susceptible to “question-order effects” which means that answers to earlier questions could influence the answers to later ones.