How to Proceed While Designing a Questionnaire

It is very important to ask your research participants the right questions in the right manner if you want your study to be successful. Thus, you should follow a stepwise procedure while you develop an effective questionnaire for your study. Check out how to go about it.

Check your goal

To develop an effective questionnaire, it is critical to understand what you are trying to find out. Thus, you should first check your goal and start designing your questions around it.

Find the relevance of collected data

You should also see that your collected data finds its usage. Do not include questions that are irrelevant to your study. There is no point in capturing data that would not be used anywhere. Design questions that can elicit answers to what you want to know.

Consider your participant and study type

You may not ask the same questions to every type of participant in your study. Design questions according to your respondents and subject matter. For example, your questions would vary for a qualitative and a quantitative study. Similarly, you should also see whether your questionnaire would be applied in a personal interaction with the subjects or over the telephone/email/post. Your question type may differ for all such situations.

Keep it short

Stay to the point, as participants may not be interested in answering a lengthy questionnaire that asks for the same information repeatedly. Thus, remove redundant questions and use direct language in your questions. Additionally, make use of commonly understood words and terms while creating shorter sentences.