Questionnaires play a vital role in research. They enable us to gather data that can reveal hidden insights about individuals. However, they do 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 surveys offer a range of advantages, such as the ability to reach a wider audience than traditional telephone or mail-based surveys and the capacity to reach a wider audience. However, they can also present a few challenges, such as the difficulty of reaching a demographically representative sample. They can also be affected by issues such as screen sizes, hardware platforms operating systems, browser settings.
When creating a questionnaire it is important to think about the research goals and objectives. When creating questions, it is crucial to understand the target audience. For example you must know whether they can comprehend and respond to the question or if they have the time to complete a long questionnaire.
It is also crucial to test new questionnaires before they are released through qualitative methods like focus groups or cognitive interviews, or pretesting (often with an opt-in survey) to ensure they’re performing in the way they were intended to. Additionally, questionnaires are susceptible to “question order effects” in which responses to questions from earlier ones can alter the answers to questions that follow.