Survey Design Process

Survey design is a collaborative approach, it involves all stakeholders in the development process. This inclusive approach is key to the success of a market research project; it ensures that all objectives are clearly defined, and all voices can contribute to the project.

Survey Design Process

Survey design is a collaborative approach, it involves all stakeholders in the development process. This inclusive approach is key to the success of a market research project; it ensures that all objectives are clearly defined, and all voices can contribute to the project.

Survey Design Process

Survey design is a collaborative approach, it involves all stakeholders in the development process. This inclusive approach is key to the success of a market research project; it ensures that all objectives are clearly defined, and all voices can contribute to the project.

Hypothesis Generation Session

All stakeholders are invited to join a conference call detailing the requirements of the project, specifically:

• The business problem being solved

• The audience that the information is going to be shared with

• Current hypotheses that need to be proven or disproven among stakeholders

• Alignment to previous research (Demographic targets, segments, question design… etc.)

• Reviewing survey targets

• Reviewing specific analyses that need to be completed

• Timeline for itemized delivery

Principles of Questionnaire Design

Without question, the greatest threat to data quality is poor questionnaire design. A good questionnaire strikes a balance between capturing all of the data necessary to meet the client’s business objectives, and treats the respondents with respect for their time and effort. Poor questionnaires suffer from at least one of two possible deficiencies:

1. Questionnaires are developed with little or no thought to the experience of answering them. Such instruments are overlong, over broad, mis-framed, assumptive or enco pass a multitude of measures that fatigue respondents who perhaps cannot recall specific details about experiences or perceptions of products, services, or brands.

To avoid poor data quality, respondent fatigue is mitigated through efficient questionnaire design that neither taxes the attention of the respondent nor overwhelms the respondent with excessive or poor information.

Whenever possible questionnaires designed trys’ to:

a. Reduce length of interview (LOI)

b. Design questions without confusing, unexplained, or ambiguous text or answer scales

c. Try to avoid grid style questions that present more than 20 possible clicks per page

d. Adding pauses to longer than 20 minute LOI designs

e. Breaking up surveys into smaller pieces, with respondents splitting up their responses into multiple sessions

2. Despite best practices, there will always be some respondents who attempt to game the system through providing poor data themselves, or using an automated response-bot. Researcher must take multiple measures to enforce good responses in its projects by adding elements that check respondent attention. Researcher has a suite of options available to ensure data quality in questionnaire design:

a. Designing “trap” questions to ensure that inattentive responses do not result in poor completes that are cleaned out in data processing. Traps can take the form of either requiring a certain response, or adding a possible red herring answer that terminates in the question.

b. Straight-lining incidence

c. Excessive LOIs (Fast or slow)

d. Bad verbatim responses

Qualifying questions:

1. What are you using this research for?

This question demonstrates that you’re committed to finding a solution tailored to your client’s survey needs,
a market research partner, committed to their business success. Your goal is to get to the specifics to the following:

Project objectives

Whenever possible questionnaires designed trys’ to:

•. What business problem is driving this analysis?

• What outcome are you looking for and how will it impact the business?

• Have you run this study before? (if so, is a prior questionnaire available)

• If there is, what do you want to change from the previous questionnaire?

• What did it not achieve or what has changed?

• Sample requirements

• LOI

• Frequency of reporting – will this be a tracker?

• Would you like to have open ended questions as part of the survey?

Deliverables:

1. Copy of designed questionnaire