Questionnaires play an important role in research. They help us collect data which can reveal hidden information about individuals. 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 offer a number of advantages, like greater reach than traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the ability to include a global audience. They also have some challenges, including the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They are also affected by issues such as screen sizes and platforms for hardware operating systems, browser settings.
When you design a questionnaire it is crucial to consider the research’s goals and objectives. When you’re creating questions, it’s crucial to know the target audience. For instance, you need to know whether they understand and respond in a way that is understandable or whether they have the time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that new questionnaires are functioning as intended, it is important to test them beforehand with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Finally, questionnaires can be susceptible to “question order effects” where the answers to questions from earlier ones can alter the answers to questions that follow.