How can you design a questionnaire that collects quality data without sacrificing length or complexity?

Before drafting your questionnaire, be clear about what information you need and why. This clarity will guide you in creating focused questions that are directly relevant to your research goals.

To design a questionnaire that collects quality data without sacrificing length or complexity, you should clearly define objectives, prioritize questions, keep it concise, use closed-ended questions, avoid double-barreled questions, include neutral options, use simple language, pilot test, group similar questions, minimize open-ended questions, consider response format, offer response pairs, use visual aids sparingly, encourage honesty, and include a thank you message. By implementing these strategies, you can design a questionnaire that efficiently collects quality data while respecting respondents' time and cognitive load.

Write questions clearly and concisely. Avoid jargon, technical terms, or ambiguous language. Make sure respondents understand each question without confusion.

Having a clear target audience is important to design a good questionnaire. Defining the type of customer that will participate in the survey will allow you to create clear and concise questions. The more simple the questions are, the more the client will be willing to answer the questions in a short period of time. Creating different types of question will allow the client to answer quickly and get to the point, such as rating scales and multiple choice questions.

To design a quality questionnaire without being long and complex we should consider the following. What are the main topics or points I want to address and what the main areas I want to research in each point.Sometimes in each point you need many areas to check and sometimes times you only need to check a couple of things only. Then, formulate the question neutrally so you don't direct participants to a certain answer. Questionnaire should have a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions.Close-ended question will be used in quantitative analysis. Open-ended questions will be used to have a broader perspective on topic to be used for qualitative analysis. While shaping questions bear in mind to have only one question for each area.

Outline the questionnaire before writing the questions. This plan should follow a logical flow, grouping similar topics together and progressively moving from general to more specific questions.

Some of the best ways to test is through cognitive testing groups, or simply having your friends or colleagues take the survey to see what is working or not. You should try to administer the survey in multiple modes - face-to-face, over the phone, internet based - to see if any of the questions are working well in one mode versus another. You can hone the survey questions over time simply by having a number of people take the early iterations.

It’s important to understand that length and complexity are both drivers of data quality. Meaning the longer and more complex the survey, the more data quality issues arise. To avoid this, consider breaking up long surveys into shorter sections and/or ensuring that the incentives you offer to respondents align with the time commitment you’re asking of them.

Make sure you clearly identify your variables or concepts and pretest the questionnaire with your target audience. Several rounds of pretest will help validate the variables or concepts.

Remove ambiguous, feeling led, vague questions or those that are likely to have a wide spectrum of answers. In these instances, instead of using open-ends or closed questions with loads of options… use qualitative techniques and create an integrated qual / quant approach to give greater detail on both the what and the why.

Survey questionnaires are a science. Definitely read up on the specifics of questions. This article is great, but just scratches the surface.