Practical Assessment Research & Evaluation, Vol 10, No 12 2
Fanning, Questionnaire design
will reduce your measurement error, as respondents
will be more likely to follow the flow of the survey,
and less likely to misread or overlook questions
(Dillman, 2000). When you design your
questionnaire survey, your respondents’ needs
should be your guiding priority (Bradburn, N.,
Sudman, S., & Wansink, B., 2004).
To increase response rates, a survey needs to
take advantage of why a person would respond to a
survey – their motivation. Dillman asserts that
people’s motivation to respond to surveys is vested
in the Social Exchange Theory, that by responding
to the survey, respondents will be compensated in
return in a way that meets some of their needs
(Dillman 2000). Perhaps the survey provides
respondents with an opportunity to voice their
concerns and incept change, or the survey is a
means of validating their participation or association
with a group or endeavor (Ekeh, 1974).
Thoughtful formatting addresses respondent
motivation in part by reducing the respondent’s
apprehension in their involvement in and
performance on the survey and increasing their trust
in the purpose of the survey (Dillman, 2000). For
instance, the appropriate placement of instructions
reduces the user’s apprehension about what they’re
supposed to do, and allows them to focus on
providing the information needed by the survey
(Babbie, 1973). Similarly, elements of graphic design
and layout, things that the user responds to but
most likely is not aware of, establish an order of
user progress through the instrument (Dillman
2000).
Initial Design Considerations
How do you format a survey? How you address
each of the following issues will govern the format
of your survey (Dillman 2000):
1. Start with a specific goal for your survey –
what is its purpose?
2. Define your topics – what are the high level
topics in your survey? What are the
secondary and tertiary topics?
3. Define your concepts – what do you want
people to do in your survey? What kinds of
information do you want them to provide?
4. Determine your content – what is the scope
of what you want to cover? How does your
content relate to your topics?
5. Consider your question wording and order
– how you ask your questions and the order
in which they appear is important. Later, we
discuss in more detail how to work with
wording and detail to maximize your
respondents’ motivation and your survey’s
response rate
6. Determine your survey’s length and format
– how long should people take to complete
your survey? How much time should you
ask of your target audience? What type of
formatting will they be more responsive to?
7. Response categories – what types of
responses do you want to include on your
survey? Multiple choice? Likert scale? You
will want to group these categories together.
8. Within your response categories, make them
consistent. For instance, how many points
do you want to include on your Likert
scales? You’ll want to keep the layout and
amount of these options consistent. Note
that the optimal number of response
options for a Likert
scale remains a topic for
debate, but several key studies
offer
evidence of the superiority of keeping the to
number seven, plus or minus two, based on
how we chunk memory (Miller, 1956).
9. Consider your question wording to avoid
sensitivity or bias – How do you ask your
questions in a way that your respondents
will trust you with their answers?
10. Minimize apprehension – What can you do
to support respondents in following
through and completing the survey without
concern that they might be making a
mistake? How do you assure them that their