In market research, you should decide what type of methodology that you want to use. In general, you can choose between survey, interview, observation, or questionnaire. Among all of them, questionnaires have become an all-time favorite method. While using questionnaires can give many advantages, not all people can design a good questionnaire. Before creating your first questionnaire, check this questionnaire design process first to make sure that you are on the right track!
What is a Questionnaire in Research?
An instrument to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from the respondents. Typically, a questionnaire can use a mix of close-ended questions or open-ended questions to gain deeper information from the respondent.
Why is Questionnaire Important in Research?
Questionnaire design is really important and if you are doing it right, you can easily gather valuable data to support your business and marketing strategy. These are several reasons why people love to use questionnaires for their research method.
1. Efficient
Since the internet has developed fast, now you can easily share your online questionnaires with others via chats, groups, online communities, etc. This method is cost-efficient, easy and you can reach a wide range of respondents.
2. Scalability
If you are using the interview method, it will be hard to collect data from hundreds to thousands of people. By using an online questionnaire, you can ramp up your audiences and target any people in the whole world.
3. Unbiased Data
A questionnaire can provide anonymity, so respondents can answer the question truthfully at ease.
What are the Types of Questionnaire?
Based on the flow of questionnaires, there are 2 types of questionnaires that you can choose :
1. Structured Questionnaires
In this type of questionnaire, you can collect quantitative data to gather precise information.
2. Unstructured Questionnaires
If you want to collect more specific data, you can use this type of questionnaire that includes open-ended questions.
Questionnaires can also be divided into the distribution channels
3. Telephone Questionnaire
While telephone questionnaires allow you to tweak the question as you want, most people would hesitate to give out too much information. In most cases, they don’t even pick up the phone from an unknown number.
4. In-House Questionnaire
Like its name, the researcher would visit the respondent’s place then conduct a questionnaire. As it is their comfortable environment, the respondent is expected to answer the question at ease so high-quality data can be collected.
5. Online Questionnaire
Nowadays, most people use online questionnaires when collecting data. The reason is clear, it is easy to conduct and more efficient, both for the cost and time. Furthermore, respondents can answer the questionnaire whenever they want so the collected data would be more accurate.
How to Design a Questionnaire for Research?
Typically, the questionnaire design process involves these 6 steps.
1. What Data That You Need?
Before creating your questionnaire, you need to determine which data that you need to fulfill your objective.
2. Who is Your Target Respondent?
After deciding which data that you need to collect, you need to identify who are your ideal target respondents. Is it better to gain data from long-time users? casual users? or non-users? In addition, you also need to consider other factors such as age, education, and other factors.
3. Choose the Methods
Depending on your type of question, it is important to choose a method that can help you gain the data that you need. For example, an online questionnaire would be a good choice if you need a lot of samples. On the other hand, you may need to use an in-house or telephone questionnaire if you need more personalized information.
4. List Your Questions
When creating a questionnaire, you should avoid asking redundant questions with similar answers. The thing is, data from SurveyMonkey even stated that there is an increase of abandon rates for questionnaires with a completion time of more than 8 minutes. Unsurprisingly, respondents take a shorter time per question when answering longer questionnaires which means they are losing focus.
5. Pre-Test the Questionnaire
The questionnaire design process is not easy. Even when you think you have created a perfect questionnaire, the respondent may not respond as you want. That’s why it is important to pretest the questionnaire to a selected number of respondents before going full-scale. By doing this, you can revise the questionnaire order, how each question is conveyed, or whether the question needs to be added or eliminated.
6. Launch Your Final Questionnaire
After the pilot test and a little adjustment here and there, now you have the final form of the questionnaire that you can share with the respondents.
5 Tips to Successfully Build Your Questionnaire Design
1. Be Specific with The Questions
When planning for the questions of your questionnaire, make sure that you ask specific questions with a clear answer. As an example, if you ask for the income of the respondent, is it monthly or yearly income? Gross or take-home pay? If the respondent answers ambiguously, make sure of the real meaning behind the answer to gain valid data.
2. Simple and Neutral Question
In preparing for a good questionnaire design, avoid complicated or opinion-based questions. If you can convey your main point in 5 words, then don’t add unnecessary words. Furthermore, give a neutral question that does not lead the respondents to certain answers.
As an example, if you ask “Do you agree that we are paying too much taxes?”, in most cases, the respondents will answer “Yes” to this type of question which is not good for your data.
3. Grouping Your Questions
Giving a long list of questionnaires can be quite burdensome for the respondents. If you have 50 questions, you can divide them into 5 big parts to make them more needed and easier to answer. Online tools like Google Forms have also developed a feature where you can divide the questionnaire to several pages or sections.
4. Give a Variety of Questions
Rather than only stick to one type of question, you can mix up short answer questions, multiple-choice questions, and other types of questions.
5. Logical Questionnaire Design
When designing your questionnaire, make sure that you create a good flow of questions. Don’t jump from one question to others that do not correlate with each other at all.
And that’s all for the questionnaire design process and some tips that you can keep in mind. Are you ready to make your questionnaire?
