Another big question you will need to think through is length. How long does it take your participants to complete the survey from beginning to end? The longer your survey is, the more likely participants will not complete the full survey. This is called survey fatigue. This is a huge problem for gathering reliable data.
Take a look at what the National Research Center has to say about Survey Fatigue for more information about two different types of survey fatigue and what they do to combat it.
Qualtrics has found that surveys that take longer than 12 minutes to complete have significant drop off rates. However, this can also depend on the context of your survey and who your participants are. What is their level of responsibility? Their commitment? Their interest? (Fanning, 2005)
If you were conducting general research on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected your personal or professional life, a health care worker may feel more responsibility and have more commitment and interest to complete a longer survey.
There are a couple of things you can do regarding the length of your survey.
First: Only include the most vital questions related to your research question. For an extra reminder, review our recommendations on Survey Planning. If you find that every question is vital for the data, you may need to consider dividing your questions in half two make two separate surveys that will be sent out to your population. In this case some of your questions will only be answered by half of your sample, but when analyzing the data from both surveys, you will get a more complete picture.
Second: Include a progress bar or mile markers to indicate to participants how far along they are in the survey. This can be something like, “There are only a few more questions we’d like to ask you…” Qualtrics recommends the use of mile markers rather than progress bars as they can actually discourage participants and lower response rates. Think of progress bars like watching the seconds on a clock tick by, it can almost make it seem like it is taking even more time than it actually is.
Third: When you pilot your survey, ask your respondents to time how long it takes them to complete the survey from the very beginning (including reading the introduction) to the absolute end. You can use this information to try to shorten your survey if needed and to include the information in your introduction which you will learn more about in the next part of this section.
