Essentials for Good Survey Questions

Limit your questions
When creating a survey, resist the temptation to ask every possible questions that comes to mind. The longer the questionnaire, the less likely people will be willing to answer your questions. If a question does not contribute to answering your research question, it is non-essential; strike it from the list. If you have no intention of analyzing and using the information gathered by a question, delete it. Focus just on essential questions.

Evaluate your survey questions

• Will it yield relevant information?
• Is it clear and unambiguous>
• Does the respondent have the information?
• Is the respondent willing to answer the question?
• Does it bias the respondent by the way it is worded?
• Does it bias the answering of subsequent questions?
• Is it logically related to other questions and have a natural flow?
• Has it been pre-tested? Use your survey with a small sample of people to see if it meets the criteria mentioned above. Actually using the survey and hearing people's responses to the questions is essential to preparing the final version of the survey that will be used in the full scale survey.