internet-based.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-questionnaires

Questionnaires are a vital part of research and allow us to gather data that can help uncover undiscovered insights about people. 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, including broader reach over traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the capacity to engage a global audience. However, they can also present some challenges for example, the difficulty in reaching a representative demographic sample. They can also be affected by issues such as screen size and the hardware platform, operating system, and browser settings, which could influence the responses.

When you design a questionnaire it is crucial to consider the research aims and objectives. When you’re creating questions, it’s crucial to know the people who will be using your questionnaire. For instance it is important to determine whether they understand and respond to the questions or whether they have time to fill out a lengthy questionnaire.

It’s also important to test the new questionnaires ahead of time with qualitative methods such as focus groups or cognitive interviews, or pretesting (often with an opt-in survey) to ensure they are working as intended. Also, questionnaires may be susceptible to “question order effects” where responses to earlier questions could affect the answers to subsequent questions.