Survey Questionnaire Development: Benefits of Professional Help. What to look for when working with an expert questionnaire development service?

Questionnaire surveys are a technique for gathering statistical information about the attributes, attitudes, or actions of a population by a structured set of questions. Survey Questionnaire designing is a multistage process that requires attention to many details at once.

What are questionnaires?

Questionnaires can be a simple survey form that any researcher can use to collect basic data about their research participants. It’s easy to conduct a questionnaire survey, but it can also be straightforwardly simple, since questions don’t have to be complex to yield useful information. For example, you can ask participants to indicate the extent to which they agree, disagree, or are unsure about a set of statements. These types of questions can be useful for finding patterns in people’s thoughts and feelings. More complicated questionnaire surveys can be conducted to collect more detailed information about the participants. These surveys are more complicated to conduct, but can yield more detailed information about your research participants.

Issues in questionnaire development

Depending on the purpose of your questionnaire, you will have different issues that you must address in questionnaire development. If you want to understand the attitudes of your research participants,

you can increase understanding by focusing on the issues below.

• Participants’ competencies – participant ability to answer the questions;
• Participants’ interests – the types of questions participants like to answer;
• Participants’ intentions – their ability to answer the questions honestly;
• Participants’ motivations – why participants are answering the questions;
• Participants’ perceptions – their ability to understand the questions.

Benefits of professional help in questionnaire development

A good questionnaire development process is the key to creating good surveys, which in turn will help you get the information you need to make good decisions. Here are some of the benefits of professional help in questionnaire development:

• Better Understanding – A questionnaire development professional can help you better understand your participants and their needs. You can then better serve them through your research design.
• Better Survey Responses – The last thing you want to happen is to create a survey that elicits substandard responses. Professional help in questionnaire development can help you avoid this outcome.
• Better Timing – Questionnaires
  take time to develop. By engaging in the process with a professional, you can ensure that you get the most out of the time spent.
• Better Survey Quality – When you develop surveys on your own, you may skip important steps that you wouldn’t notice until it’s too late. A professional will be able to help you avoid these problems.

Best features of a good questionnaire

Here are the best features of a good questionnaire: –

• Clear instructions – When people are asked to complete a questionnaire, it can be confusing. A questionnaire that is not clearly explained can leave participants confused and/or frustrated.
• Clear and Concise Questions – Research has shown that long, convoluted survey questions don’t yield better results. In fact, participants often get lost in their responses.
• Multiple Choice Questions – A multiple choice questionnaire is a good choice for many questions. If you ask participants to choose from a menu of answers, you can be sure that they answered all the questions you asked.
• Questions That Can Be Answered Vaguely – A question that requires an either/or decision can be answered with a range of degrees of truth. For example, “How often do you visit your family in the Philippines?” can be answered with a vague “sometimes”.

Choosing a Professional Questionnaire Development Service

When it comes to choosing a professional service to help with your research, you should be well aware of the quality of the team entrusted with creating your survey questions. The service should be providing statistically sound resources for enabling you to develop fundamentally productive questions. The experience of the service providers and completed projects are another measure to judge the quality of the service. The cost to quality and the data analytics capabilities of the service for you to further process your survey are an essential aspect to consider. Pre-testing or reviewing your survey once your design is ready is a great feature if provided.

Questionnaires are a great way to get quick, large-scale data. However, they are not as accurate as other research methods. In order to get the most accurate and useful information from a questionnaire, you need to follow certain  guidelines and when taking professional help, see that they implement these guidelines in their process.