Survey Process White Paper Series Questionnaire Design 101: Getting Started

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1 Survey Process White Paper Series Questionnaire Design 101: Getting Started POLARIS MARKETING RESEARCH, INC LINCOLN PARKWAY, SUITE 320 ATLANTA, GEORGIA

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3 Questionnaire Design 101: Getting Started Creating a questionnaire requires as much science as art, and incorporating those two elements into a high-quality survey that will draw a good response rates while effectively collecting accurate data often takes time and experience. It is highly recommended that you and your team go through the entire questionnaire design process to make sure that any survey instrument you create will be an effective tool for gathering the information you need. Key steps in the design process include: Determine the information needed Determine which survey methodology is most appropriate for your needs Specify individual questions to be asked Decide what question structure, rating scale, and wording is appropriate Properly order the questions within the questionnaire Proof and pretest survey with small sample to check performance Make changes based on pretest and execute survey You should consider the nature of the target respondent group when wording questionnaires. The methodology (for example, phone vs. online), also dictates what types of questions can be included and how they can be asked. A few general rules that should be followed include: Make sure your response categories cover most plausible responses and include an other category. Be very specific and keep it to one concept per questions. If necessary, break a complex question into several simpler ones. Create a logical order to the questionnaire with similar topics together and in context. When creating a list of response categories for multiple choice questions, make sure that each response is clearly different from the others with no confusing overlap. Build questions that are clearly understood. Write clearly and avoid unfamiliar words, jargon, technical terms and jargon that may be unfamiliar or confusing to your respondents. 1

4 Don t use leading words and biased questions. Respect your respondents privacy and allow them an out to skip answering personal questions (religion, education, income level, politics) if they so choose. Forcing a response can lead to hang ups and terminates. Most important of all, remember that respondents are doing you a favor by participating and you should always respect their time, sensitivity, privacy and opinions. A respondent who was treated courteously and respectfully is likely to participate in other marketing research surveys. When creating a survey questionnaire, there are basic types of scale questions to have in your tool box. They are: Nominal when numbers are used to identify objects, such as social security number, license numbers or daily customers. In this case, the number acts mostly as a data tag, typically for identification. Ordinal when numbers are used to indicate the relative position, but not indicate the magnitude of the difference between those positions. An example of this would be rankings in which items are listed by priority, say first through fifth, or competitive events where the quantifiable difference in perception between #1 and #2 is unknown. Interval when a rating scale is used and the zero point is arbitrary. An example of this is satisfaction scores (satisfaction of 3 on a scale of 1 to 5) as well as most other attitude and opinion questions, regardless of the scale used (3, 5, or 10 point). Unlike ordinal, the difference between each data point is fixed. Ratio the most useful of all of the scales in creating a questionnaire, ratio scales allow the researcher to incorporate each of the above listed scales into one (nominal, ordinal and interval). The key difference with ratio is that unlike the interval scale, it is anchored with an absolute zero point. Examples of ratio questions are market share, income group, age group, etc. 2

5 If you are creating a questionnaire from scratch, it is important to be mindful of these scales as each one lends itself to a particular type of data analysis. For more information about survey research processes, please visit our website at or call us at Research LifeLine is a division of Polaris Marketing Research, Inc. 3