Writing Good Survey Questions: Examples

Summary: Writing Good Survey Questions - Examples

Creating a good survey is an art and a science. The process for constructing any survey is an instructional design project in and of itself and requires analysis & testing, design & testing, development & testing, implementation & testing, and evaluation, which is basically more testing.

There are many ways in which to ask questions. The type of question used depends on several factors:

• The data that is required
• The amount of time one has to analyze the data
• The degree to which respondents understand the construct in each question

Heading List

1. Open-ended Questions
2. Partially Close-ended Questions
3. Close-ended Questions
4. Close-ended Questions with Ordered Responses
5. Close-ended Questions with Rating Scale
6. Resources

1. Open-ended Questions

Open-ended questions are often used to find out what people think about issues. The danger with open-ended questions comes when people's understanding of the concepts included in the questions differ. For example: the open-ended question number five asks about features. If people do not have the same construct of "features" or if someone doesn't understand the construct at all, the question will not get us the data we need.

2. Partially Close-ended Questions

Many times, respondents may not be familiar with the constructs in the survey. For example: if we ask an open-ended question about instructional strategies, we assume that everyone knows what instructional strategies are; they can recall or find a list of them; they understand what each instructional strategy entails; and, therefore, can identify which instructional strategies they will be using. Not everyone has had "Introduction to Instructional Design" or they may currently be taking the class and haven't gotten to instructional strategies yet.

Partially closed-ended questions are open-ended questions with a comprehensive list of possibilities included. Respondents are saved the step of having to recall or look up a list of instructional strategies. Sometimes the creators inadvertently omit an item that a respondent is planning to use. To cover such cases, respondents are allowed to add extra choices in the form of a choice designated as "other".

Partially closed-ended questions can be in the form of "choose one" or "choose all that apply" depending upon what data is required.

3. Close-ended Questions

Carefully constructed close-ended questions:

• Dramatically reduce the amount of cognitive overhead that would be required to answer the equivalent open-ended question
• Dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to sift through the data

Constructing a close-ended question requires the creators to do a very in-depth analysis of the respondents because all those cognitive steps inherent in answering an open-ended question must be identified and addressed for each and every close-ended question.

Close-ended questions may contain two-option responses such as "true/false" or "yes/no", one-best-answer responses, or a number of other types of forced-choice responses.

4. Close-ended Questions with Ordered Responses

Close-ended questions with ordered responses allow creators of the survey to collect two types of data for each item; whether the item is used or not as well as the frequency of use. This kind of data can be important for making certain kinds of complex decisions.

6. Resources

• Questionnaire Design: Asking questions with a purpose (PDF) by Ellen Taylor-Powell