Through a bit of reverse suggestion, the author offers ways to violate the cardinal rule of questionnaire development: thou shalt not offend thy respondents. The un-suggestions include: show them you don’t care; insult them with words; insult their intelligence; and make them play the guessing game.
Questionnaires and surveys are an important
A game-changing, targeted C-level contact list for your business reaches decision-makers personally, fast-tracks sales cycles, opens c level contact list up strategic partnerships, and ensures revenue growth. Amplify your outreach with curated executive contacts so that your message gets to the right people at the right time.
There’s no better way to know what customers
The survey (whether conduct in person, on the phone, in writing, or over the Internet) allows market researchers to gather feback from large numbers of customers and rapidly analyze their responses. There’s one important hitch to the process, though. The feback you receive on surveys will only be as good or as useful as the questions you have ask.
There are several things you can do to design useful questionnaires, such as being clear about your information goals and making sure your questions match up with those goals. In this article I’ll focus on the more mundane business of exactly how to go about wording the questions.
Regardless of your information goals, producing a well-design questionnaire requires a clear focus on the customer. As a teacher of survey design to beginning researchers, I can attest that most first attempts at designing questionnaires lose that focus. Even more-experienc survey researchers find it hard to keep the customer front-and-center during the design process.
Every textbook on survey research has
A list of dos and don’ts for writing good survey questions. Herb Weisberg and his co-authors Jon Krosnick and Bruce Bowen advise question designers to use clear, unambiguous wording, avoid writing bias questions, avoid double-barrel questions, and avoid using double negatives.
Earl Babbie’s textbook on promoting diversity and the next generation of creative empowerment survey research methods recommends the following laundry list for question construction: make items clear; avoid double-barrel questions; ensure the respondent’s competency to answer; ask relevant questions; use short items; avoid negative items; avoid bias items and terms. Floyd Fowler has written a whole book on the topic of designing survey questions.
All this advice really boils down to just one thing
The many textbook rules converge into this one simple principle. The problem is that following even this single rule is a lot harder than it looks. When designing a survey questionnaire, there are countless opportunities to violate this simple-looking rule. Let’s review the options.
Show them you don’t care
Each question is an opportunity to demonstrate to respondents how little you’ve thought about or care about their answers. For example, consider asking two or three questions at the same time. That way respondents won’t actually be able to answer the question with the categories provid.
Or, make it impossible for phone number sa them to answer your questions in the categories provid because the categories aren’t mutually exclusive or don’t map onto their experience. Extra options are available in self-administer surveys where only the smallest spaces can be provid for open-end responses.
This way, respondents understand that open-end responses are not actually want. If possible, the whole survey can also be in a small font with limit white space so that respondents feel like they have to work hard in order to complete the survey. Speaking of hard work, make the questionnaire as long as possible so respondents are fully aware that their time is freely available to meet your nes.
Insult them with words
The quickest way to offend respondents is to insult them through the language chosen for the questionnaire. Pejorative and emotionally-charg labels are a sure way to turn respondents off.
This is why researchers typically use the most widely accept terms for racial or ethnic groups. Similarly, questions about events or people involv in activities thought to be undesirable make especially easy options for insult; use a pejorative label for an undesirable activity or physical condition and you’ll be sure to insult.
Insult their intelligence
There are a number of ways to make respondents feel stupid. One of the easiest options for self-administer questionnaires is to hide the skip pattern so respondents can’t tell if you realize that the questions being ask don’t apply to them or if you want them to contort their lives to fit into your neat categories.
The add benefit here, especially for Internet surveys, is that you may be able to come back to the respondent and ask them to correcttheir work when they don’t answer all the questions.
That way you get two chances to make them feel stupid. Another variant is to use vocabulary they don’t know. This makes it clear that more ucat respondents are the ones being sought and those who don’t make the grade should go elsewhere.
And, just in case you have a respondent bold enough to ask about a term us in a telephone or face-to-face interview, have interviewers reply with whatever it means to you.Another way to make respondents feel stupid is to quiz them repeatly on an obscure topic.
By the end of the series, respondents will get the message loud and clear. If you’re not planning to use this as a sugging opportunity (selling under the guise of polling) to push your tutorials on the topic, you might want to balance a research interest in assessing awareness on your obscure topic with the respondents’ ne to be remind how little they know.