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Articles Writing good questionnaires Writing good questionnaires can prove the difference between getting a phenomenal response or sitting at your desk waiting for your email to bleep.
When using multiple-choice, never use 1-5 because it allows people to choose 3, thus sit on the fence and not give an opinion either way. We always use 0-5, which looks very similar but because we extend it to 6 options (by moving down numerically, not up) we ensure that people must sit on either the positive or the negative side of the fence.
Surveys and questionnaires can be different, but both often fall into common traps. Both surveys and questionnaires aim to gain a response from the audience, but often serve only to portray the opinion of the one writing the questionnaire.
For example: “How fast was the car going when it bumped into you” will get a different response to “what was the speed of the car” or “how fast was the speeding car going” or “how fast was the offender going when he smashed into you?” each sentence is laden with their own meanings and bias. A better question is “speed of car:”
Another good ploy if you want to use questionnaires to influence rather than question is to pre-fill some of the answers to a question with existing answers. This needs cunning to do effectively, and I would certainly not recommend it for most questionnaires, but I have seen the following types of ploys used in the past:
The questionnaire might ask for the user to provide an estimate on the population of a city. If you want to guide the participant, you might add an example: “If you think the answer is 4 million, please write this figure in the box, like so:”. What does this do to influence someone? It provides a guide. Experiments show that when a questionnaire provides a guide, regardless of what the guide is, the participants aim for something similar.
Perhaps you have seen game shows where two contestants need to guess the closest number to a given answer. The first contestant guesses (in this example 500), and the second one guesses that the answer is much higher. It makes sense for the smart contestant number 2 to only guess one higher to win (501) otherwise they risk going too high and loosing.
Again the law of proximity occurs here.
Try it yourself... write down the words “My guess” at the top of a piece of paper, followed by a 12 digit number and (without telling anyone what you’re doing) then on the next line down, write “Your guess:” and hand the paper to a friend and ask them to write down a number to see whether they can accurately guess what number a third person is thinking of. I can almost guarantee that the answer you get from your friend will be more than one digit (and probably at least 3 digits) in length. The likelihood is that if you DO ask the third person what number they are thinking of, they will say “7”.
The point of this exercise is that people are led by example. In questionnaires the same is occurring. As with people queuing outside a room, as soon as one person enters, everyone feels safe to enter. It is the same with questionnaires. If there is an example which shows, consciously or not, what the answer is likely to be, they will head for that. So your task is to avoid any kind of hint in the questions that you ask.
This is much harder to do than you might think.
Myo International are experts in using psychology to optimise language, including questionnaires. If you would like some help preparing your documents, please call us on +44 (0) 1752 764447 or contact us now.
