Questionnaires are a vital part of research and allow us to gather data that can help uncover some of the most obscure information about people. However, they aren’t without 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 questionnaires have a variety of advantages, like more reach than traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the capacity to engage a global audience. However, they can also present several challenges for example, the difficulty of reaching a demographically accurate sample. They can also be affected by issues such as screen sizes and platforms for hardware, operating systems, and browser settings.
When designing a questionnaire, it is crucial to consider the research aims and objectives. It’s also important to consider the audience you’re asking, such as whether they internet-based.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-questionnaires can comprehend and respond to the questions you have asked them to answer, or if they have time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test new questionnaires before they are released using qualitative methods such as focus groups or cognitive interviews. testing them in the pretesting phase (often with an opt-in survey) to ensure that they are working in the way they were intended to. Questionnaires are prone to « question-order effects » where the answers to earlier questions can affect the answers to subsequent ones.