Hints for Designing Effective Questionnaires

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Hints for Designing Effective Questionnaires

• By Robert B. Frary
• Presentation By Scott Brooks

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Article Overview

• Tips and hints for designing effective
  questionnaires
• Some things to avoid when designing questionnaires

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Questionnaire Tips

• Keep questionnaires brief and concise
• Long questionnaires cause annoyance and
  frustration
• Authors try to include every question possible
• Peripheral questions, like something that might
  be nice to know should be avoided
• Get feedback on initial questions
• More in-depth analysis

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Questionnaire Tips (cont.)

• Locate personal or confidential questions at the
  end of the questionnaire
• Early unsettling questions could cause the
  respondent to discontinue the questionnaire
• Use ordered categories
• List from lowest level to highest level
• 1) Never 2) Seldom 3) Occasionally 4) Frequently

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Questionnaire Tips (cont.)

• Ask responders to rate both positive and negative
  stimuli
• Responders tend to mark every item at the same
  end of the scale
• Positive and negative responses required the user
  to evaluate and make a choice

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Questionnaire Tips (cont.)

• Choose appropriate response category language and
  logic
• Use statements that can be assessed adequately in
  many cases
• 1) Agree 2) Disagree
• When opinions are not very strong or well formed,
  use the following
• 1) Agree 2) Tend to agree 3) Tend to disagree 4)
  Disagree

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Questionnaire Donts

• Avoid open-ended questions
• There is too much variation in written responses
• Avoid the response option other
• Responders might feel uncomfortable with the
  absence of an applicable response
• Use clear and defined options

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Questionnaire Donts (cont.)

• Avoid scale point proliferation
• Takes too much time and effort
• 1) Never 2) Rarely 3) Occasionally 4) Fairly
  often 5) Often 6) Very often 7) Almost always 8)
  Always
• Hard for a subject to reliably distinguish more
  than six or seven levels of response
• 5 levels are usually sufficient

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Questionnaire Donts (cont.)

• Avoid responses at the scale mid-point and
  neutral responses
• Non-responses are replaced by neutral responses,
  not providing the honest opinion of the responder
• Avoid asking responders to rank responses
• Dont expect the subject to rank more than six
  things at a time

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Conclusion

• Questionnaires are an easy and effective way to
  get user feedback
• Following the previous dos and donts of
  questionnaires, user feedback should be both
  meaningful and helpful