Questionnaire Design

A good questionnaire plays an important role in marketing research. Therefore it is important to

make sure that you spend time to see that your questionnaire is properly designed. A good
questionnaire acts as a control device in your research. It makes sure that there is uniformity in
data collection and that all respondents are responding to the same question. Without this, the
information gathered is practically impossible to analyze. In addition, a well-designed
questionnaire will typically cost less than one that is poorly designed.
Questionnaire Design - Preparation
There are two primary steps you need to perform before starting to build a questionnaire. The
first step is to determine what information you need to gather for your research. It is a good idea
to make sure you meet with the manager in charge and determine what information they need to
have gathered. Even the best-designed questionnaire is just a waste of time and money if it
doesn't collect the information management needs to make a decision. In addition, management
can let you know of any restraints in project resources that may exist that could require you to
cut back the breadth or depth of your research. Another good idea is to check secondary research
sources before creating the questionnaire. If the information you need to gather has already been
gathered by another source, there is no need to "reinvent the wheel" by re-gathering the same
information.
Once you have determined what the objectives of your questionnaire need to be, the next step is
to determine how you are going to collect your data. Will you conduct phone surveys? Will you
give people a self-guiding questionnaire or will you have an interviewer conduct the survey with
each respondent? Is there some other method that may work best for your particular research
needs? Once you have determined this, it is time to start building a questionnaire.
Questionnaire Design - Writing the Questionnaire
The first step of actually writing the questionnaire is to determine the types of questions you will
ask. There are three main types of questions:
1. Open-ended questions.
2. Closed-ended questions.
3. Scaled-response questions.
An open-ended question is one in which the respondent is free to supply any answer to the
question they want. An example of open-ended questions you are probably familiar with is essay
test questions. Some of the advantages to this type of question is they don't restrict the
respondent to a particular list of answers, they provide the researcher with a much wider group of
information, and they allow an interviewer to probe respondents for further and more in-depth
information about a particular topic. The main disadvantages are this type of question is much
more time consuming, and may be biased towards the responses of more articulate survey
participants.

Closed-ended questions are questions requiring the participant to choose from a list of possible
answers. Closed-ended questions come in two types. One type is a choice between only two
answers. Examples of this are yes/no questions and true/false questions. The other type is
multiple-choice questions. You may be very familiar with this type of question if you have ever
had to take a scan-tron test in the testing center. The advantages of closed-ended questions are
they are cheaper and easier to administer and easier to analyze the collected data. However,
there are also several disadvantages. Closed-ended questions do not provide as rich a source of
information as open-ended questions. Sometimes a person's true response to a multiple-choice
question may not be an available answer. In addition, research has found that people tend to be
biased toward the first choice in two-choice questions or towards the first and last choices in
multiple-choice questions.
Scaled-response questions are questions that require participants to indicate on a scale their
attitude toward a particular subject. If you have ever filled out a teacher-evaluation form then
you have participated in a questionnaire that contained scaled-response questions. The main
advantage of this type of question is its ability to measure a respondent's intensity of feeling
toward a subject. The main difficulty is the possibility that respondents don't understand the
scale. For example, if a question asks, "On a scale from one to ten, what is your opinion
about" The participant may be wondering, "is ten the highest or is one the highest?"
You may decide to make your questionnaire entirely of one type of question, or you may decide
that it is best to use a variety of different question types depending on the data you need to
gather. The important point is to make sure you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each
type of question against the information you need to gather and use the question type (or types)
that will enable you to gather and analyze the data the best.
Once you have decided which type of questions will best help you in collecting your data, you
need to carefully consider the wording of each question. The wording needs to be clear so that
the respondents understand the question and how to answer. Avoid jargon and complicated
verbiage. Also, your wording needs to be geared towards the target group. For example, if your
questionnaire were designed to gather information from elementary school children, you would
probably choose different wording than you would in a questionnaire designed for law school
students. If a questionnaire is confusing to respondents they may choose not to complete the
survey.
Other considerations in wording your questionnaire include avoiding words that might bias
responses or questions that respondents can't accurately answer. For example, if you were to ask
participants how many times they saw the movie Star Wars while it was in theaters, many people
may not remember and will end up making a guess that is not accurate.
Finally, in writing a questionnaire it is important to consider the flow and layout of questions.
The first few questions should typically be screening questions. For example, if you need to
gather information about the diaper preference of mothers with young children, your first few
questions should determine if the respondent is a mother with young children. It doesn't do any
good to have respondents such as single, male college students completing the rest of the
questionnaire.

Following the screening questions, it is best to continue with general questions that are easy to
answers. This helps the respondent to feel more comfortable with the survey, and if an
interviewer is administering the survey it helps the interviewer to build rapport with the
respondent. Questions should continue in a logical order and get more specific in nature. The
most difficult questions should be placed towards the middle of the questionnaire. This way the
respondent has grown more comfortable with the survey but is not yet likely to have grown tired
of it. Questions respondents are least likely to answer (sensitive or possibly threatening
questions) should be saved until toward the end. Research has found that in some cases, a
respondent has gotten into the habit of answering questions by this point and are therefore more
likely to answer these types of questions. In addition, if they choose to quit the survey at this
point, you have still been able to collect a majority of the desired information. Finally, always
place demographic questions at the end of the questionnaire.
Questionnaire Design - Questionnaire Evaluation
Now that the questionnaire has been written, you want to evaluate it before using it. Go back
through the questionnaire and ask yourself if each question is really necessary. Make sure that
the questionnaire is not too long. People are less likely to complete a questionnaire if it gets too
lengthy. If the questionnaire contains open-ended questions, make sure there is plenty of room to
record responses. It is also important to make sure the questions will gather all of the
information needed. Make sure there are questions pertaining to each objective of the
questionnaire. Also, if there are questions that don't appear to meet any of the predetermined
objectives of the questionnaire, eliminate them.
After you have completed your evaluation, you should take the completed questionnaire back to
the manager you are gathering information for and have them approve it. This gives the manager
a chance to check and make sure the data they need gathered will be collected by this
questionnaire and to double check that the questionnaire will not be collecting unnecessary data.
After the questionnaire has been evaluated and approved by the appropriate people, one final
check you may want to do is to have a small pretest of the survey. This gives you a chance to
have a small sample of people actually take the survey. This may sometimes reveal problems
with the survey that were not apparent to those who have been working with it throughout the
entire creation process.
Depending on the changes needing to be made during the evaluation of the questionnaire, you
may need to go back and re-write parts of the questionnaire. Depending on the extent of the
changes, it may also be necessary to go back through part or all of the evaluation procedure.
Once you finally have the questionnaire completed, you are then ready to conduct your survey.