Once you feel that you have refined your questions to a high quality, it’s time to review them to choose which questions you want to include in your survey. Choosing the right questions to ask is key to ensuring that the data you collect properly corresponds to your research question(s) and reduces the fatigue that participants may feel when there are many questions in a survey. Below you’ll find a few important questions that can help guide you in this process (Gibbs, 2012):
- What type of information do you need from this question?
- How will the answers serve the aim of the survey?
- How will you present the findings from answers to this question?
- Do you need numbers and counts from the answers?
This short video provides further explanation about the guiding questions listed above and the process of choosing questions.
When you choose your survey questions, you should keep in mind that your participants’ perspectives are key to answering your research questions and that their time is limited. Since your study relies on your participants’ perspectives, you need to try to ask every relevant question that you have on the topic. Make sure that you can collect all the necessary information from your survey and that the information you collect will be useful to your study. Since your participants’ time and patience are limited, it’s doubly crucial that your survey is as brief and meaningful as you can make it.
Personal Project
Consider the questions that you may have written over the last couple of pages. Now it’s time to think about which ones you want to use. Go down the list of guiding questions above to make sure that each of the survey questions you are including is necessary for answering your research questions. Ask yourself what should be edited, added, or deleted in order to adequately answer your research topics. Use this process to choose a final set of questions for your questionnaire.
