Tag: Questionnaire Design

The is the title of a book I have mentioned before in another context.  But before I go further I acknowledge that the lead author (Roger Tourangeau) is an old friend; one co-author (Ken Rasinski) is a former colleague; and the other co-author (Lance Rips) just has a very cool name for a guy in…

One of Don Dillman’s Principles for Writing Survey Questionnaires says: "Avoid specificity that exceeds the respondent’s potential for having an accurate, ready-made answer."  It’s a good principle but hard to follow because clients often want to know how many of this or how many of that.  So we ask it anyway and instead of getting…

The issue of ranking questions keeps coming up.  In general, survey methodologists seem to favor rating style questions over rankings, especially if the number of items to be ranked or rated is large.  Dillman says it best when he writes ". . .avoid asking respondents to rank large numbers of items from top to bottom. …

This issue came up in DP the other day when a quex came through with a question design that was fairly difficult to program.  It started with a question that had a long list of potential responses (8 in all) and rather than asking it as a ranking question (good design choice!) the first question…