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How To Write A Questionnaire

1) The document provides guidance on how to write an effective questionnaire for market research, including establishing clear objectives, structuring questions logically, and piloting the questionnaire before full distribution. 2) It recommends starting with general questions and moving to more specific ones. Keep questions concise and use simple language without jargon. Consider your respondents' demographics and segment your market appropriately. 3) The main types of questions are outlined as closed, open-ended, multiple choice, scaled and ranked. Piloting the questionnaire with a small test group is essential to refine any issues before full research.

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Jennifer Hanna
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532 views2 pages

How To Write A Questionnaire

1) The document provides guidance on how to write an effective questionnaire for market research, including establishing clear objectives, structuring questions logically, and piloting the questionnaire before full distribution. 2) It recommends starting with general questions and moving to more specific ones. Keep questions concise and use simple language without jargon. Consider your respondents' demographics and segment your market appropriately. 3) The main types of questions are outlined as closed, open-ended, multiple choice, scaled and ranked. Piloting the questionnaire with a small test group is essential to refine any issues before full research.

Uploaded by

Jennifer Hanna
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Market Research

How to write a questionnaire


Writing a questionnaire can be as a simple or as complicated as you want it to be. It really depends on the information you want to collect and the significance of the decision that its going to help you make. For example, if you are planning to open a new shop based on your research results, you should be as rigorous as possible in conducting your research. This part of the survey is usually at the end. Information collected in this part of the survey could include: age, gender, education level, income, marital status, occupation and name. If you are surveying businesses, you could collect details of the size, location and age of the business and the types of products or services sold.

Step 1: Your survey objectives


Once you have worked out what you want to achieve, you can start writing your questions. You need to be very clear about why you are conducting your survey and the information you need to gather. Your research objectives will shape the questions you ask, the way you word them and the order you ask them in. Keeping your objectives in mind think about how they impact the following points: Questionnaire structure Give some thought to the length of the questionnaire, the questions you will ask, how you will phrase them, the order you ask them in and the general layout of the questionnaire. Your questions should have a logical flow, with related questions grouped together. Whos answering the questions? Your questionnaire must be relevant to the people youre asking to complete it. Some areas to think about include age, cultural background, gender, education level and English proficiency. If you dont word your questions appropriately, you run the risk of getting misleading information or putting the respondent offside by wasting their time. How will you group the respondents? How do you segment your market? Ask questions which will allow you to group responses by your market segments. For example you might like to find out how many women aged 25-35 use your service compared to men of the same age.

Step 2: Writing the content


Now that youve established what you want the questionnaire to achieve, how you will structure it and the types of questions you need to ask, its time to write your survey. Take your time and refine your questions to make sure you get it right. A few points to remember are: Introduce the questionnaire The introduction persuades the respondent to participate in the survey. It explains who is conducting the study, how the information will be used and guarantees the participant confidentiality. The introduction should make clear: the purpose of the questionnaire why it is important for you why it could be useful for the respondent how long it should take to complete what will happen to the results complete contact details final date for a reply Ask questions in a logical order The questions should have a natural, logical flow. Its a good idea to start with general questions and then ask more detailed, difficult ones as the questionnaire proceeds and the respondent becomes comfortable. Some general rules are: go from general to particular go from easy to difficult go from factual to abstract start with closed format questions start with questions relevant to the main subject do not start with demographic and personal questions

Aim for brevity Keep the questionnaire as short as possible. If it is long and complicated your response rate will drop. Stick to the essential or very useful information and be prepared to discard questions which relate to secondary or unnecessary information. Also keep questions as short as possible so that they are easily understood. Use simple language Phrase your questions in simple language. Dont use jargon or abbreviations which might be unknown to your target sample. Check grammar and spelling carefully. Be precise Be careful to avoid questions that may be ambiguous. It is important that all respondents get the same meaning from each question otherwise the results will be flawed. Use the right type of questions Put simply, different types of questions provide different types of answers so its important to use the right type of question, depending on what you are trying to find out. There are advantages to every type of question. A major disadvantage of open ended questions is that they are difficult to analyse. If you have 500 people with a different response to a question how are you going to identify patterns in their answers? When writing your questions think about how you will analyse the responses? Will you count them, enter them in a spreadsheet or use a statistical analysis program? The capabilities of the system you use to analyse your results will affect the complexity of the question that you ask. Also remember to give respondents instructions about how you want them to answer. Can they select one response? Multiple responses? Do they have to rank their response? The main types of questions are: Open ended eg: Do you have any suggestions about how we could improve our customer service? (indicate below)

Multiple choice eg: Which of these media do you get your news from? (select more than one response) Newspaper Radio TV Internet Scaled eg: Using the scale below, how would you rank the following? 1 = excellent 2 = good 3 = satisfactory 4 = fair 5 = poor Our prices Our customer service Our product range Our location The quality of our products Ranked eg: Please rank these buying motives in order of importance where 1 = most important and 6 = least important Price Service Range Location Quality Design

Step 3: Piloting the questionnaire


After youve written your survey get your friends and family to try it. Once youve made changes from their feedback you can then pre-test your questionnaire on a small sample of people who are characteristic of your target audience. After you have tested the questionnaire you might need to rewrite or reorder some of the questions. Piloting your questionnaire is an essential step in the process so give yourself plenty of time to do it.

Closed eg: Do you own a car? (select one response)


Yes No

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