After facilitating a particularly fun abbreviated session of our Designing Quality Survey Questions course with Oregon Community Foundation staff earlier this year, I had a few colleagues approach me separately but with the same “aha” moment: Much of the guidance provided about survey question design applies to other scenarios too, both in and beyond research! …
Kim here, writing once again with my powerhouse survey design partner, Sheila B Robinson. Open-ended questions have the potential to yield high quality, rich, nuanced data that provide deep insights into people’s attitudes, behaviors, experiences, and more. Sometimes we genuinely need open-ended survey questions to capture the information we’re looking for. Open-ended questions often feel…
Kim here, writing again with my survey design bestie Sheila B Robinson and today we want to talk about respect. Respect gets little respect in most survey design textbooks, but we talk about it in over a dozen places in Designing Quality Survey Questions. People are surveyed all the time these days. Survey fatigue is…
We know that poorly written survey questions can lead to inaccurate data, cause survey fatigue, and result in non-response. Question makeover #1 There are two significant problems with this question. Let’s start with the question stem. Here, our first instinct is to answer in our heads “Well I am NOW!” We know they meant “before…
Have you ever heard that all of your survey questions should use the same rating scale to make it easier for people to respond? Or that if you include demographic questions, you need to include all possible demographics, and always at the end (or beginning) of the survey? Or that you can only measure one…