Crafting effective surveys can be a bit complicated but it’s not rocket science for sure. Just keep the following pointers in mind while creating surveys:
- Be clear about your survey goal. This will help you to determine your audience and come up with relevant questions.
- Use simple language that can be easily understood by participants of all backgrounds.
- Make sure your questions and answers are short and clear.
- Use acronyms only if you’re sure that your audience will understand them.
- Avoid over surveying your participants. Instead, try and gather enough information in the first go. Over-surveying causes survey fatigue which leads to low response rate.
- An ideal survey should contain mostly close-ended questions along with a couple of open-ended ones.
- Use of double-negatives in questions can confuse participants who can misinterpret your questions.
- Ensure that you’ve set all important questions as mandatory.
- Providing a ‘not applicable’ answer option will help you gather accurate data.
- Use a five-point scale rather than a four-point one; the latter does not offer a neutral answer choice.