Questionnaires play an advantages and disadvantages of questionnaires essential role in research. They let us collect data which could reveal hidden information about individuals. However, they do have their limitations.
Questions can be self-administered, with participants answering all questions themselves, or researcher-administered, where the research team interviews a sample of respondents by phone, in-person, or online. Self-administered questionnaires tend to have lower response rates than researcher-administered questionnaires, due in part to the impersonal nature of mailed paper surveys and automated telephone menu systems.
Web-based surveys have many advantages, including a larger audience than traditional surveys that are that are conducted by telephone or mail and the ability to include an international audience. However, they also come with problems, like the difficulty of reaching a representative sample of the population. They can also be affected by issues such as screen sizes and platforms for hardware operating systems, browser settings.
When creating a questionnaire it is essential to take into consideration the research goals and objectives. It’s also important to consider your target audience when designing questions for them, like whether they can comprehend and answer the language you use or if they have the time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test the new questionnaires ahead of time using qualitative methods such as focus groups or cognitive interviews, or testing them in the pretesting phase (often with an opt-in survey) to ensure that they’re functioning according to their intended purpose. Finally, questionnaires can be susceptible to “question order effects” in which responses to earlier questions may affect the answers to questions that follow.
