Types Of Questions In A Survey Questionnaire

Designing a questionnaire seems to be an easy job. But then a poorly designed questionnaire leads to deeper troubles in your survey, even creating problems while executing data analysis. Proper data processing or survey processing needs correct blend of questions in the questionnaire.

One of the important tasks involved in a market research project is to design questionnaire that will ensure proper responses from the respondents. This article tries to enlist the types of questions that can be used by a researcher. Selection of a question type depends on many factors - response categories available, education level of respondents, etc.

Here is the list of question types -

1. Closed single: when there are only two possible response categories, then this question type is used. For example, day / night or male / female. Such questions are also called dichotomous questions

2. Closed multiple: when more than two response categories are available, such type of question is used in the questionnaire. Such questions are usually deployed when the response categories are starkly different from each other. For example, a question like which all places from the following list had you ever visited in the last two years followed by a list of towns. The respondent is free to tick as many places as she had visited with no limit on the number of possible responses.

3. Scaled: there are situations when responses have to be gathered on a scale. A scale is a way of measuring respondents' attitude or perception. In other words, it tries to convert the mental attribute into mathematical quantity. For example, how much are you satisfied with the after sales service provided by the service center? Then the respondent is asked to rate her responses on a scale starting from one to five (or 7 or 10). Usually lower the number, lower will be the satisfaction and vice versa. Scales are not easy to design (they may seem so) and more so selecting a proper type of scale which will correctly measure the mental attribute.

4. Open-ended: when the researcher is not sure of the expected response from the respondents or one wants to offer some 'space' to the respondent for answering a question, such type of question is used in the questionnaire. There are two types of open ended question - numeric and text. Numeric questions are used for relatively simpler questions like what is your age or how many children do you have. Open ended text questions are used to have 'verbatim' collected from the respondents. For example, what did you like most when you had last visited an amusement park. An open ended question like this is possibly going to throw more light on the subject rather than offering a close ended question with limited number of response categories.

Arvind Bhate

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