Designing an effective questionnaire is both a science and an art.
However, there are certain criteria you can apply to make sure your questionnaire
is effective.
These criteria include is the survey logically sequenced?
Does it use screening criteria to make sure the respondent should be
answering the questionnaire?
Does it include demographic questions?
Includes substantive questions?
Include question types that are appropriate to the situation and
business question.
The first criteria is logically sequenced screening,
at the beginning of your questionnaire, if you are approaching people randomly and
want to make sure that they meet the criteria for answering the survey.
So for instance,
if you want to do a random survey of residents who are smokers in Davis,
you would start off with an introductory paragraph stating that you are looking for
people to answer a very important questionnaire about tobacco products.
Do you or anyone in your household smoke cigarettes?
If the answer is yes, you would tell the person to continue with the interview.
If not, you could simply thank them for their time and move on to the next person.
This relates to the next criteria, which is to include demographic questions that
serve to screen for how the respondent meets the criteria for the study.
What is their sex, age, income, place of birth, and ethnicity?
An example of this is which age bracket do you fit?
18 to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44,
45 to 54, 55 to 64, or 65 and above?
So for example, before going into the question about diapers,
you might include a question about the ages of children in their home.
This allows you to screen for your target market segment.
The next criteria is including substantive questions.
By this, we mean asking questions that will have
meaning to the person who is reading them.
If the respondent isn't in your target market or interested in the topic,
they won't be interested in filling out the questionnaire.
And example of this is I recently received a request to fill out a survey on diapers.
Since it has been a long while since I gave birth to my son,
the topic did not really interest me.
But when I was asked to fill out a survey on travel destination gift boxes,
that topic interests me, so I completed the entire questionnaire.
So the questions about diapers was not a question for
someone in my age group, but questions on travel were important to me,
because they had significance or meaning to me.
The next criteria is to include question types
that are appropriate to the situation in business question.
In the rest of this video, we're going to cover some of the standard question types
used in most online survey tools, like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey.
Most of these survey tools will feature all of the question types we're going to
go over but sometimes names them somewhat differently.
So just be aware of that.
First of all, the most common types of questions are multiple choice questions.
These are simple and easy for both the survey creator and taker.
There are variations, such as multiple correct answers or single correct answer.
Rating scale questions allow respondents to rate something at a defined
level within a stated range, such as 1 dissatisfied,
2 somewhat dissatisfied, 3 neither satisfied or dissatisfied,
4 somewhat satisfied, or 5 extremely satisfied.
The most common of these types of rating questions is the Likert scale,