Short short short

Keep your questions short, but keep your questionaires short too. When crafting your survey, make a mental distinction between what is essential to know, what would be useful to know and what would be redundant. Ask all essential questions, perhaps a few other useful questions to add value to your study, and forgo the rest. As a guideline, if the question is not important enough to include the study report, they are probably better left out.

Use simple words

Survey respondents may have a variety of backgrounds so use simple language. Words are often used in different ways by different people, and therefore questions must be written so that each person will interpret in the same way. You may consider relaxing grammatical standards of the questions to reduce formality. For example, “who” may be appropriate in many instances when “whom” is grammatically correct.

Write questions such that everyone will understand it in the same way. Don’t assume that everyone has the same understanding of the facts or a common basis of knowledge. Technical jargons might not be understood by everyone, so use them only when absolutely necessary.

Don’t go back so far in time

If you need to field questions which require respondents to recall past events, you will get more reliable information from them in a more recent time scale. Instead of asking respondents to recall something within the past year, try to ask for the past month instead. You may find it useful to help them “earmark” your time scale by providing hints to the period.

Instead of: “How many times have you watched a sporting event in the past year?”

Revised: “How many times have you watched a sporting event since last year’s Olympics?”