Challenges and Advantages of Questionnaires and Web Experiments
Questionnaires play a vital role in research. They allow us to collect data which can reveal hidden information about individuals. However, they aren’t 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 questionnaires provide a host of advantages, like broader reach than traditional telephone or mail-based surveys and the ability to reach a wide audience. However, they do pose some challenges including the challenge of reaching a representative sample. They can also be affected by issues like screen sizes, hardware platforms, operating systems, and browser settings.
When creating a questionnaire it is important to think about the research goals and objectives. When designing questions, it’s crucial to know your audience. For example it is important to determine if they can understand and respond in a way that is understandable or whether they have time to finish a lengthy questionnaire.
To ensure that the new questionnaires are functioning as intended, it’s important to test them before hand by using qualitative methods such as focus groups, cognitive interviewing, or pretesting. The questionnaires are subject to “question-order effects” where the answers to earlier questions may affect the answers to subsequent ones.