Questionnaires play an important role in research. They allow us to collect data which can reveal hidden information about people. However, they do have their limitations.

Questions can be self-administered, with participants answering all questions themselves, or researcher-administered, where the research team interviews a sample of respondents by phone, in-person, or online. Self-administered questionnaires tend to have lower response rates than researcher-administered questionnaires, due in part to the impersonal nature of mailed paper surveys and automated telephone menu systems.

Web-based questionnaires have a variety of advantages, such as greater reach over traditional phone or mail-based surveys and the ability to reach a wide audience. But they can also pose several challenges, such as the difficulty of reaching a demographically representative sample. They can also be affected by issues like screen sizes and hardware platforms, operating systems, and browser settings.

When designing a questionnaire, it is essential to take into consideration the research objectives and goals. When you’re creating questions, it’s crucial to know the target audience. For instance, you need to know whether they understand and respond in a way that is understandable or do they have the time to complete a lengthy questionnaire.

To ensure that the new questionnaires work as they are intended, it’s crucial to test them in advance with qualitative methods like focus groups, cognitive interviews, or pretesting. The internet polls questionnaires are subject to “question-order effects” which means that answers to questions from earlier ones can affect the answers to subsequent ones.