Questionnaires are a crucial part of research and allow us to gather data that will allow us to discover some of the most obscure information 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, including a wider audience than traditional surveys that are that are conducted by telephone or mail and the ability to engage an international audience. However, they can also present a few challenges including the challenge of reaching a demographically accurate sample. Additionally, they are subject to issues like screen size and hardware platform, operating system and browser settings that could influence responses.

When designing a questionnaire, it is crucial to consider the research objectives and goals. When you’re creating questions, it’s crucial to know the people who will be using your questionnaire. For example, you need to know whether they understand and respond in a way that is understandable or if they have the time to complete a long questionnaire.

To ensure that new questionnaires are working as intended, it’s essential to test them before hand with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. Questionnaires are prone to “question-order effects” where the answers to earlier questions may influence the answers to subsequent ones.

questionnaires and web experiments