Clearly, you can’t test everyone – it’s rather plausible that there have to be certain restrictions with respect to the target audience of your questionnaire. The selection of groups is a key factor for maximizing the robustness of your study.
Another aspect to consider is whether you want to run multiple questionnaire sessions over a longer period of time with a single group (longitudinal design), or if you want to present your questionnaire once to two or more groups (cross-sectional design).
While the former allows you to analyze how the questionnaire results of the group change over time, the latter delivers insights into differences among groups.
Smart questions are the cornerstone of every questionnaire. To make them work, they have to be phrased in a way that prevents any misunderstandings or ambiguities.
It’s often a lost cause trying to analyze data from a questionnaire where people have mixed things up, selected incorrect answers or haven’t been able to read or understand the questions at all.
It makes a significant difference whether you want to hand a questionnaire to children, adults, or maybe even elderly participants. It’s important to consider the cognitive, attentional, and sensory competencies of your target group – handing out long questionnaires with a huge amount of questions in small letter print and complicated phrasing might be too taxing for many participant groups.
Additionally, remember to avoid jargon or technical language – the text needs to be fully understood by anyone completing the questionnaire.
There’s a wide variety in how to phrase questions. In explorative questionnaires, you will find mainly open questions, where participants can fill in any answer (this makes sense whenever you try to gain an understanding of the topics associated with your research question).
By contrast, quantitative questionnaires primarily include closed-questions, which have been predefined by the researcher either in form of multiple choice answers or rating scales (such as the Likert scale).
Here’s one example:
Open question:
“What did you like about the webinar?”
Closed question:
“The webinar was useful.”
