Tips for Creating a Questionnaire Survey

If you take the time to craft good questionnaire, you’re well on your way to getting the reliable results you need to reach your goals. First, you need to choose which question type to use. We offer both open questions, where respondents are expected to make personal comments and closed questions, which give respondents a fixed number of possible answers. Answer options for closed-ended questions include yes/no, multiple choices (multiple answers), a Likert rating scale, etc.

That was not all. You also have to decide how to ask your questions. See below for tips on how to write questions correctly. If you follow these tips, you’ll be creating questions like a pro in no time!

Tips for Creating Polls:-

Ask Mostly Closed Questions:-

In the case of open questions (with freely formulated answers), answering them is associated with a higher (also time-consuming) effort. Too many open-ended questions can cause respondents to stop answering prematurely.

Ask a maximum of 2 open questions per survey and position them on a separate page at the end if possible. In this case, even if the respondent then abandons the survey, you can still use the answers on the previous pages.

Formulate the Questions Neutrally:-

If you imply an opinion (or ask a leading question) in the question, it can mislead respondents into giving an answer that doesn’t reflect their actual feelings and attitudes.

Suppose you ask the following leading question:

“We think our customer service representatives are great. How great do you think they are?”

This question conveys an opinion that you want the respondents to agree with. With the following change in wording, the question becomes objective:

“How helpful do you find our customer service representatives?”

Be Careful Not To Only Give One-Sided Answer Options:-

As seen in the previous point, respondents must be able to provide honest and considered feedback. Otherwise, the credibility of the answers is at stake.

The answer choices you provide are also a potential source of bias. Suppose you provide the following response options when asked about the helpfulness of customer service agents:

  • Extremely helpful
  • Very helpful
  • Helpful

In this case, there is no reply option in case the staff is not helpful. In this case, too, the question must be made more objective, but this time with fewer one-sided answer options:

  • Very helpful
  • Helpful
  • Neither nor
  • Not particularly helpful
  • Not helpful at all

Don’t Ask Two Things At Once:-

Confusing respondents is just as bad as influencing their answers. In both cases, they opt for answers that do not correspond to their actual opinions and preferences. A common reason for the confusion is a so-called “double question”, in which the respondents are asked to judge two things at once. Example:

“How do you rate our customer service and the reliability of our products?”

Customer service and product reliability are two different issues. If you mix both topics in one question, you may force respondents to judge only one of the items or to skip the question entirely.

Fortunately, this problem can be fixed quickly. Just ask separate questions for both topics:

“How do you rate our customer service?”

OR

“How do you rate the reliability of our products?”

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