What are the best practices for designing effective survey questions?
Creating effective survey questions largely depends on your understanding of the survey objectives. With a clear purpose in mind, survey questions should be crafted that help to achieve the desired outcome. Here, we explore the best practices for designing survey questions.
First and foremost, survey questions should only focus on the objectives of the survey. This can be easily avoided if questions are aligned to an overarching goal. A good idea to avoid unrelated questions is to plan a survey with a team, as different points of view often help to improve your survey.
Also, when crafting a survey question it is important to be mindful of the various types of questions that exist. Questions can be split into open-ended questions or close-ended questions, further split into scaled questions, single-select, multi-select, and ranked questions depending on the type of survey.
To ensure accurate answers, the language used in questions should be as specific as possible. Abbreviations and jargon should be avoided as much as possible, as well as ambiguous phrases that could result in more than one interpretation. Constructing questions in the same style and format will help to ensure survey consistency, which also helps to reduce respondent confusion.
When creating survey questions, it should be taken into account that there might be a certain challenge with response rates. To combat this, questions should be kept short and snappy, and should not take up too much time. If possible, offer a skip logic which helps respondents to move quickly through a survey.
Bys taking each of the above into account, you'll be able to design effective survey questions that will help to achieve the desired outcome. Ultimately, effective survey questions are instrumental in obtaining useful data from your respondents.