Challenges and Advantages of Questionnaires and Web Experiments
Questionnaires are a crucial element of research that allows us to collect data that can help uncover the hidden truths about people. But they are not without their limitations.
Questions can be self-administered, with participants answering all questions themselves, or researcher-administered, where the research team interviews a sample of respondents by phone, in-person, or online. Self-administered questionnaires tend to have lower response rates than researcher-administered questionnaires, due in part to the impersonal nature of mailed paper surveys and automated telephone menu systems.
Web-based surveys offer a range of advantages, such as more reach than traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the capability to reach a wider audience. But they can also pose a few challenges like the difficulty of reaching a demographically representative sample. They can also be affected by issues such as screen dimensions as well as hardware platforms operating systems, browser settings.
When designing a questionnaire, it is important to think about the research aims and objectives. It’s also critical to know the audience you’re asking for them, like whether they are able to understand and answer the questions you ask them in the language you choose or if they have time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.
It’s also important to test the new questionnaires ahead of time using qualitative methods such as focus groups or cognitive interviews. testing them in the pretesting phase (often using an opt-in survey) to ensure they’re performing in the way they were intended to. Also, questionnaires may be susceptible to “question order effects” in which responses to earlier questions can affect the answers to subsequent questions.