How to design and create good survey?
In order to create survey that will have results easy to analyze and make conclusions, we recommend to follow three basic steps.
Gender and age information always is a good way to analyze questions. Male answers tend to differ from female answers, younger persons usually answer differently that older ones.
Depending on your survey topic, you might want to collect data on people location, their education and income level too. The more information you have on respondents, more easier to find trends and differences in the answers.
Let’s assume that we are preparing questionnaire on traveling to London. Some general information questions could be:
- Have respondents gone abroad before or do they travel within the country only?
- How often they travel? For what purposes they travel (business, city breaks, skiing, etc)?
- What transportation means they prefer using (car, train or plane)?
- What budget they usually spend?
- How long is their average trip?
- Are they planning any trip in nearest future?
- Where do they want to go?
All these questions give you information about general travel trends among your respondents. It allows you to separate different traveler groups. For example, business travelers, often travelers, low budget travelers, etc.
Specific question examples about visiting London could be:
- Which of the following cities you would like to visit during next year? (include London as option)
- Have you been to London before and how many times?
- What was the purpose of your trip to London?
- Which places did you visit in London?
- What is must see in London?
- How did you travel to London?
- Where did you stay?
- How much did you spend on your trip?
Specific questions provide information directly about your topic. What people think about it. Now respondent personal data and general information questions are very good basis for detailed survey analysis.
In overall well designed survey will have about 10-20 questions. Shorter one most probably will gather too little data. Longer one might collect unnecessary information and some respondents might not complete the survey if it is too long.
We advise to have at least one or two open questions without predefined answer options. This is great way to find out something new about your topic that you did not know before. In choice questions answer option “other” also serves this function well.
It is suggested to have some evaluation questions too – valuation scale, matrix question or hierarchy questions. These questions find out people perceptions and values of the topic rather than basic knowledge and previous experience, interesting aspect to look in.
Following these steps and advices shall help you to create survey, which will be good basis for data analysis, correlations and conclusions required by your research.
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