Web Surveys 101

Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Sample Survey: Employee SatisfactionQuestion order is an important part of questionnaire design. Whether it's a paper feedback form on customer satisfaction or an online survey to gather employee feedback, how you order your questions could impact your survey findings. When you create surveys, dont simply list the questions in the order they pop into your head. The ideal survey has a natural flow and the question order makes sense.

Thankfully, most web based survey management software gives surveyors the freedom to rearrange survey questions to achieve the best question order. Unlike when you're creating a survey in an office suite - like Microsoft or Open Office - where the survey creator needs to copy, paste and delete to rearrange questions, online survey tools allows you to move questions with a click of a button.

If you're new at creating questionnaires, here is a commonly used, and accepted, method for ordering questions:

  1. Qualifying questions
  2. Open ended questions
  3. General/Overview questions
  4. Specific questions
  5. Demographic questions
  6. Additional comments question

It's important to start off general and move towards more specific questions. Otherwise, when someone is answering a general question, after answering specific questions, their honest general feelings are likely to get skewed either towards their feelings about the last set of questions or overall. I like to think of this scenario:

Mary is completing an online customer satisfaction survey for her cellphone provider. The questionnaire begins with specific questions about her service and experiences. While Mary is satisfied overall with her wireless company, the survey pointed out some pain points. The last question asked Mary to qualify how satisfied she was overall with their service, because Mary was reminded of past issues ranked them lower than she would have if they'd asked a general question in the beginning.
 
For me this scenario really brings home the importance of question order. When you sit down to design your next online survey project spend some time thinking about the flow of your survey. I think you'll find it's a lot easier to order survey questions logically than it may seem reading about how to do it. However, if you still find it difficult to create a survey with logical question flow, Cvent offers online survey services through our Professional Services Group that can help you with survey question design.

Comments for Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings

Saturday, January 2, 2010 by md asrul masrom:
Hi there, I am a PhD student. I am conducting a research to identify attributes that influence contractor satisfaction on construction project. Now I am in the process of developing a questionnaire for the survey. I have prepared a set of questionnaire. It is divided into three main sections namely Sec A- Direct attributes, Sec B- Indirect attributes and Sec C- General information. It starts with a list attributes with a likert scale 1 to 5. This question is to identify which are the attributes significant in influencing contractor satisfaction. Then, followed by the indirect attributes such as contractor experience, knowledge, size and culture. And the last section is general information. The reason it begins with a specific question is because the contractor can give feedback/ answering the questioan easily and brilliantly as they still not exhausted with the previous question. Then they can answer the following question easily as most the general information ask are simple and a basic question. I hope that you could give some feedback. I am thanking you in advance.

Leave a comment





Captcha