January 28, 2013 in the dark days of survey creation, survey question writing was confusing. Then came forth the 10 commandments for writing good survey questions to guide everyone from elite researchers to entry level interns in all things survey question writing. Could, should, and might all sound about the same, but may produce a 20% difference in agreement to a question the supreme court could /should/ might change the limits on free speech in light of terrorist activities.

Strong words, such as prohibit may represent control or action and influence your results. Questions placed out of order or out of context should almost always be avoided. Then more specific questions, followed by more general easy to answer questions like demographics at the end of the questionnaire. Do you like orange juice? this is very uncleardo i like what about orange juice? taste, texture, nutritional content, vitamin c, cancer prevention properties, the current price, concentrate, or fresh squeezed? be specific in what you want to know. Issues of meaning and frequency are particularly difficult to specify: do you watch tv regularly? what is regularly? does it matter what i watch? is a dvd the same as tv?.

Asking about caloric content, bits, bytes and other industry specific jargon and acronyms is confusing. Thy audience must understand thy language level so that thy survey response rates may be high and data clean. Respondents may not want, or may not be able to provide the information requested. Questions about income, occupation, finances, family life, personal hygiene and personal, political or religious beliefs can be too intrusive and rejected by the respondent. Incentives and assurances of confidentiality will help in addition to adding a prefer not to answer option.

Do you have all of the options covered? if you are unsure, conduct a pretest using other please specify as an option. When building multiple choice survey questions, make sure to cover at least 90% of the respondent answers so thy data shall be clean. biased example: when measuring alcohol consumption patterns, one study used a quantity scale that made the heavy drinker appear in the middle of the scale with the polar ends reflecting no consumption and an impossible amount to consume. appropriate example: we expect all hotels to offer good care and may use a scale of excellent, very good, good, and fair. What is the fastest and most economical internet service for you? the fastest is certainly not the most economical.

The question do you think basketball players as being independent agents or as employees of their team? is not dichotomous. When you increase the length of questions and surveys, you decrease the chance of receiving a completed response. What commandments do you use to create good survey questions and better surveys. This post is part of the online surveys 101 series put together by scott smith ph.d. There are some common mistakes that are easy to make even on the simplest of questions. use the following list as your guide to help avoid these possible pitfalls. make your questions easy to understand by using simple language. The goal is to write a question that your reader will easily understand without having to reread it.

A good exercise to practice is to write questions that you could see yourself asking friends or colleagues. You want to use words that are more commonly understood, such as almost all. When you ask your respondents to rank items in order of preference or importance, try not to surpass six items.