How to Write a Questionnaire or a Written Survey
Questionnaires and written surveys can help you in obtaining feedback or information regarding anything that you are researching on. For instance, if you recently introduced a new product into the market, your organization is going to require feedback from the customers. In order to take that feedback you must design questionnaires so that you get to know more about the perspective of the people regarding the product. This technique has been used by several organizations across the globe. Now there are online surveys and questionnaires available as well, so people can fill them out from the comfort of their homes.
Instructions
-
1
When you want to start off writing a survey, you must first decide upon all the information which you want to gather from it. Take down pointers regarding everything you would like to know from the population.
-
2
Make sure that you are able to gather all the information in the easiest way possible. How can that happen? It can happen if you design a short survey. People will find it easy to answer your questions that way.
-
3
Certain surveys require you to talk to the other person. In such cases, make sure that you do not sound too professional. Just feel casual and your conversation style should be easy to understand for the people.
-
4
Make sure that your survey is structured in such a way that the questions follow a logical order (from general to specific).
-
5
Try to give the people a few options to choose from. Multiple choice questions help the respondents in a lot of ways. They fully understand the purpose of your question and it also reduces time to complete the questionnaire.
-
6
Try to give questions that always generate the truth. The question cannot state “How great was our service”, but “how was our service”. This changes a lot of things.
-
7
The rating scale should remain the same throughout the survey. It is easier for the respondents to adopt the same scale throughout the questionnaire, rather than understanding different scales for different questions. For instance, if the scale you have chosen is from 1 to 5, ranging from bad to good, try to maintain that scale for all questions that require scales.
-
8
Before you plan to start distributing your survey, try to survey ten to fifteen people first. After they have answered all your questions, conduct interviews with them. Ask them whether they fully understood your questions and whether they were easy to answer or not. Improve your questionnaires if the people have something different to offer.
