How to design a good questionnaire

Questionnaire is a measurement method and a part of social research. However, designing a questionnaire is not that simple. Only when you do it yourself can you know that it is difficult to do it, and you know that making a high-quality questionnaire is a skill.

Take the online research platform Zhongdiao.com as an example. Today, I will talk to you about the design method and some basic common sense of the questionnaire, hoping to bring you some useful help.

I. Preparatory work

1, questionnaire positioning

Before designing the questionnaire, you must be clear about the following questions: What is the purpose of your questionnaire? Who is the subject of investigation? How to investigate? This is the general direction of the questionnaire. If there is a deviation here, then the subsequent work is basically useless. For example, now we are going to do a market survey on toothpaste, and the moderator of questionnaire design must first understand the market situation of toothpaste.

2. Literary foreshadowing

You can read relevant industry research reports or similar reliable questionnaire research, which will help to avoid going in the wrong direction and provide new ideas. If you have the conditions, you can find relevant data, plan the data first and do some data analysis, which is very beneficial to the design and distribution of the questionnaire in the future.

3. Search for hot spots online

Next is the topic design, how to be targeted? Designers can go to Weibo, WeChat, Baidu Index, Post Bar and other high-traffic platforms, input keywords to search, filter and sort, and design themes according to the content of the search. Or you can add some QQ groups to chat with the interviewees, which is professionally called "interview". The most important thing at this stage is to understand their views on the areas you want to know and the problems you want to solve. what do you think? Who do you want to send the questionnaire to and how to send it without a high rejection probability-strictly speaking, if a questionnaire has a high rejection probability, then the questionnaire design is a failure and meaningless.

Second, the questionnaire design

Principles of problem design

1. Don't ask if you can.

Understand that the capacity of our questionnaire is limited, because the time to fill it out is limited. The ideal questionnaire design should be to get the most research information through the least questions. Try to use as few double negatives as possible, and don't use too many options when using multiple-choice questions.

2. Don't ask questions irrelevant to the research purpose.

Always remember that your questionnaire serves your research purpose, so don't put the cart before the horse. Avoid recalling questions, especially those long ago, and the accuracy will be very low. If you can choose, try to use closed questions and less open questions.

3. Creative design problems

Your research purpose is abstract and macro, and the questionnaire you want to design is to decompose the research purpose at the micro level through specific questions, so how to get the information you want by asking questions with theoretical support and research purpose behind them requires you to work hard on the question setting.

4. Clarify the logical relationship of questionnaire questions.

If the question you ask is abrupt and illogical, it will not only make it difficult for the respondent to answer, but also be a great trouble for the researcher when analyzing the questionnaire in the later stage, because you have no idea how to study it at all! ! So how to design a good questionnaire? How to write logic articles in the later stage of research. Therefore, the above documents predict and

Be sure to do a good job in searching for hot spots on the Internet.

Formal part

Under normal circumstances, a complete questionnaire consists of the following four elements: questionnaire title+introduction+basic information+conclusion.

The following are introduced one by one:

Questionnaires: Follow the principle of "clarity+conciseness" to avoid delay.

Introduction: The writing of introduction is very important, because it is related to the first impression of the filler. Content writing order

The order is: 1. Introduce the identity of the investigator: which school students; 2. The abstract purpose of this questionnaire survey; 3. Fill in the description of the questionnaire (anonymous, tick/write options/write words, etc.). ); 4. Description of research purpose: academic research or commercial use, and all these show the research literacy of your researchers, so you must pay attention to it; 5. Name and time of the investigator.

Basic information: filling information+subject content

(1) Fill in the information of the person.

Generally speaking, it must include: gender, age/grade, occupation/major; Others depend on the purpose of the study.

(II) Main contents

Questionnaire questions, including multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, matrices, etc. , with the following formal requirements: 1. Neat layout; 2. There are no typos; 3. There is no option sorting error.

Conclusion: Generally speaking, out of courtesy, we must express our gratitude to the investigators, such as words of thanks, greetings, seasonal attention and so on.

After the questionnaire design is completed, it also needs to be checked, because the existence of a flaw directly affects the intuitive feeling of the filler and the evaluation of your research work by peers; At the same time, it also reflects the research literacy of researchers.

Questionnaire promotion

After the questionnaire design is completed, it enters the stage of publicity and promotion. The common way of offline mode is to find a passer-by A or a passer-by B to fill in, which is inefficient and whether it can be guaranteed to be true remains to be discussed. So, we will not discuss it. Here, I mainly talk about the online promotion of questionnaires. Many questionnaire websites have promotion outlets. Here, I mainly introduce the promotion methods in Zhongdiao.com, all of which are free.

Sharing and promotion

The four main traffic portals, Post Bar, WeChat, QQ Space and Weibo, must be taken seriously. Linking the sharing questionnaire to any one of them will bring considerable traffic, and other sharing plug-ins can also be used together.

Email invitation

The premise is that you have enough mailboxes in your hand, import them into the mailbox invitation box of the public network in batches, and click Send.

This is the end of questionnaire design and publicity. Interested people can also study the copy of platform-Zhongdiao.com's design, so it's time to practice.