It would help if you built your surveys on a solid foundation of sound survey questions to produce surveys that yield insightful data. Although it might seem obvious, this is crucial for the success of your entire survey. Higher response rates—and a better chance of obtaining high-quality data that will help your organization flourish—can be achieved when questions are thoughtfully crafted, well-organized, and considered from all possible perspectives.

What makes a survey question valuable?

Numerous fundamental qualities determine meaningful survey questions. Thus it’s worth asking:

Your inquiries—are they clear?

A question should be phrased clearly, concisely, and explicitly. Jargon, double negatives, and double-barreled queries are only a few obstacles to answering a question.

Are your inquiries neutral and unbiased?

The caliber of the answers you get significantly depends on how you phrase your inquiry. Leading, ambiguous, or opinion-based questions will muddy your results.

Are you asking the correct questions?

We understand many questions; you might only sometimes know which one to use. But doing it correctly entails improving the survey experience such that the questions are understandable and the findings are precise.

Does the survey’s layout support the questions it asks?

Not all communication is verbal. Well-crafted survey design and well-worded questions improve survey quality. This covers the use of necessary questions carefully, skip logic, and response choice randomization.

There can be significant effects on your results when survey questions are not straightforward. Your respondents may become survey tired due to unclear questions, resulting in survey abandonment or incorrect responses. Additionally, if your respondents think you incorporated bias into your survey or overloaded them with leading questions, they can have a bad opinion of your business and alter their responses. You’ll get survey results that are only sometimes considerate, sincere, or worthwhile.

What can you do to ensure appropriate survey questions?

You can always rely on the AI feature of Articence to help you generate customizable questions based on best practices. Additionally, our survey templates are fully loaded with questions created by experts in various fields, including market research, customer satisfaction, product testing, and more. However, there are several other considerations to make as you design your surveys in addition to those go-to sources. Let’s discuss some survey question categories and suggestions for more decisive survey questions.

Open-ended queries

Do you want to hear the responders’ own words? You must use an open-ended question, which calls for respondents to enter their responses into text boxes instead of selecting from pre-defined response options. Open-ended inquiries encourage insights into respondents’ thoughts, sentiments, and experiences because they are exploratory. In reality, productive open-ended inquiries frequently delve into all three and operate as follow-ups to earlier closed-ended questions.

One of these open-ended questions appears after respondents react to the closed-ended NPS question about how probable it is that they would suggest a company to a friend or colleague:

·         What adjustments would this business need to make for you to rate it even higher?

·         What does this business excel at?

Which open-ended query the respondent receives depends on how likely they are to refer the business, but both offer marketers a chance to learn more about their NPS score and specifics about what their consumers like and dislike.

Open-ended questions can also be used as a general, concluding survey question. Consider how frequently a question like “Do you have any other comments, questions, or concerns?” appears at the end of an online survey.

This is a fantastic question as the final one since it allows respondents to add details or concerns not covered in the preceding close-ended questions. The best part is that it can present many advance perspectives and chances for additional investigation. For instance, if respondents express concerns about your product’s accessibility in the open-ended text box—something you hadn’t considered a pain point for the user experience—you know the problem needs fixing.

Open-ended inquiries should always focus on quality over quantity. Try to keep the number of them down because they need more time and effort from respondents. Keep the number of open-ended questions to two and include them on a different page at the end of your survey. Additionally, you should exercise caution when requesting answers to open-ended inquiries, especially if they are sensitive and don’t build upon a prior closed-ended response. If you make respondents fill out an open-ended question they find intrusive or irrelevant, they may make up an answer or respond with gibberish to finish the survey.

Close-ended queries

Respondents are given a predetermined list of options for answers in closed-ended questions. Although they don’t have the same flexibility as open-ended inquiries, they are intended to gather concrete information and quantitative responses. Consider the distinction between asking which of three restaurants you’d want to eat at and asking, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”

Multiple choice, Likert scale, drop-down, yes/no, and checkbox questions are just a few examples of closed-ended questions. Choose the appropriate close-ended question type depending on the kind of information you’re attempting to elicit. You may be asking a question about a demographic and want to allow responders to check every option that applies. In that situation, you must display your answer options as checkmarks. If you use a multiple-choice question format to inquire about demographics, provide a “fill in the blank” answer option to allow respondents to submit their responses. If you’re ever concerned that none of your answer selections will apply to your respondents, this “fill in the blank” method is a perfect solution.

Examples

You must consider the responder’s experience and how your wording might be understood (or misunderstood) because closed-ended questions depend on pre-set answer possibilities. The best closed-ended inquiries don’t go too far or say too much. Here are three examples of wrong closed-ended questions for a survey on employee engagement:

·         Many times, people in the business rank our corporate culture as having one of the best. What do you think of our workplace culture? (Rating Scale)

·         My company’s management values open communication and applauds excellent work output. (Strongly agree vs. strongly disagree on the Likert scale)

·         How happy or unhappy are you with the amount of communication when working with staff from other departments? (Highly satisfied to highly dissatisfied on the Likert scale) 

The first is an illustration of a leading question that directs the respondent to provide a particular type of response. The second question has two barrels, which means it refers to multiple problems or subjects but only accepts one response. In this situation, a respondent might believe management typically acknowledges a job well done but may only sometimes communicate effectively.

There are a few errors in the third question. It is assumed that the respondent regularly works with people from other departments. What sort of communication is meant—verbal, email, or Slack messaging? This is not a problem if the survey has already utilized screening questions or skipped logic to ascertain the respondents’ collaborative tendencies. If not, this type of hypothetical query might not yield precise.

Rating Scale Inquiries

Often referred to as ordinal questions, rating scale questions fall under closed-ended inquiries. They employ a scale from any range (typically 0 to 100 or 1 to 10) and ask customers to choose the number that best encapsulates their response. Since they employ a numerical scale to determine how likely customers are to promote a business’s products or services, NPS inquiries are a suitable illustration of rating scale inquiries.

Examples of rating scale questions are provided below:

·         How would you rank our customer service on a scale from 1 to 5?

·         How likely would you tell a friend or family member about our website?

·         How would you rank the workshop’s instructor today?

Likert-scale inquiries

A particular kind of rating scale is the Likert scale. The “agree/disagree” and “likely/unlikely” queries gauge attitudes and opinions in Internet surveys. They use a five or seven point rating scale that ranges from one extreme response to another, going beyond the straightforward “yes/no” question. For instance:

Strongly agree

Agree

I do not agree or disagree.

Disagree

Strongly disagree

The middle-ground response option is crucial for Likert scale questions (and rating scale inquiries in general). Good Likert scale questions aim to measure sentiment toward a specific topic in great depth. You need a precise, symmetrical scale that can measure both positive and negative emotions to do that.

Adjectives are used carefully for effective Likert scale inquiries. You want your respondents to know immediately whether the grade is bigger or higher; you don’t want them to wonder whether “pretty much” is more significant than “quite a lot.” Your results will only be as accurate if the descriptive phrases are arranged in an understandable manner with logical measures.

When it comes to Likert scale answer possibilities, we recommend the following:

Use extremes at either end of your scale that contain the phrases “extremely” or “not at all.”

Assign a moderate or neutral response as the scale’s midpoint, such as “moderately” or “neither agree nor disagree.”

Use words like “very” or “slightly” together with other precise descriptors for the rest of your response choices.