It’s unlikely that you have never done a survey or filled in a feedback form about a seminar or such. Unfortunately, it is also unlikely that everyone of those questions you answered was clearly written or easy to understand.
If you are involved in preparing any surveys/feedback forms, it is important to think carefully about how you ask questions. Obviously, the first step is to know what answers you need – do you really want to know how old people are or just the difference between adults and teenagers?
Here are three recent examples I have come across where the question is not going to get the right responses:
“1. Please list as many soft drink flavours you can think of”
“2. For each flavour, please select A, B or C where A is ‘yes, I knew it was a flavour but forgot it’, B is ‘I didn’t realise it was a flavour’ and C is ‘I’ve never heard of it’. {and then list every flavour whether or not the person listed it in question 1}”
So if you had written orange as a flavour in question 1, how can you select A, B or C for orange in question 2? As it was an online survey and answering was necessary, people would guess an answer so the final results mean nothing.
“Were you satisfied with the course handbook?
- excellent
- very good
- good
- ok
- poor”
The options do not answer the question – was I satisfied can only be answered with yes/no/partially. To offer those choices, the appropriate question would be ’How would you describe the course handbook?’
“Which of the following have you ever given your child?
- brand X vitamins
- brand Y multi-vitamins
- brand Z mulitvitamins
- brand XY kids calcium”
Personally, I hadn’t given any of them to my child but there was no option to say ‘none of the above’ or even ‘other vitamins’.
So once you have written any questions, go back and read them in order to see if they make sense and are complete. One way to check multiple choice answers make sense it to add each one to the question so “were you satisfied with the course handbook? excellent” quickly shows an issue.
I’ll go through some tips on writing useful questions soon! In the meantime, what poor survey questions have you noticed or had trouble answering?
Tags: answers, complete, feedback, need, questions, sense, survey
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Hello, I found this blog when i was surfing for blogs related to survey as I like learning more. I have tell you, your site is good. I like the layout too, its refreshing. I don’t have the time now to slowly read your blog but I have noted it and I also registered for your RSS feed. I will return in a day or two and hope to find more survey related posts to teach me. Thanks for an informative site.
Thanks for visiting and for your nice comments. I hope your future visits are useful.
Love the ‘Are you Male/Female?’ questions and I always answer yes where possible. I still prefer when they just ask ‘Sex’ to which I always respond ‘yes please’. It is amazing how many people set up their web forms to allow free text in these fields.
I like your answers, Older
So many people know what they mean and expect, but forget that the rest of us might not so leave us confused or with space to give funny and responsive answers!
This is a great blog post and I like you what you have said here. I’ve subscribed to your RSS feed so I’ll be reaindg regularly now
Thanks for sharing your time and ideas about survey questions – it’s very useful to get advice on this. I have noticed stupid questions when doing surveys but now realise I may have written some, too…
It’s nice to be appreciated Cloe – thanks
I hope these tips help you get effective results from any surveys you run.
Good Article – got me thinking which is always useful, lol
I don’t write surveys but have been thinking about setting up a feedback form on my site so have bookmarked this page as a reminder to write clear questions, lol
Glad to have inspired you to write clearly, Buddy O
Good luck with your feedback form.