Creating Online Surveys, Cont'd
Open Question Types
Open-ended questions are questions that permit an unconstrained response. They generally allow richer detail in areas that you as the survey creator couldn’t have anticipated, and can convey to the respondent that their true opinions are being recorded and heard. They’re more difficult to process, however - you can’t total the results or graph them; the most you can do is painstakingly assign responses to subjective categories, or else cherry-pick a few to quote in a written report.
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Essay questions (sometimes called “multi-line text”) are the most open - they allow the respondent to type a full paragraph or more.
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Text boxes (or “single-line text”) are partially open - they allow only a few words, and so you’ll only find a small amount of the unexpected in them.
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Best for: providing an "other" option to multiple choice, for cases that demand a brief response (perhaps “How did you hear about us?”), or for standard demographic data like Name, Address, etc.
Other Question Types
These more specialized question types are not available with all online survey packages.
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Numeric inputs (or “single-line: numeric”) are barely open - they allow only numbers, but they don’t restrict the choice of number. If you’re trying to be very precise, it can be better to ask rating questions on a 0-100 scale rather than multiple choice. Warning: some survey systems will ignore or reject anything other than the digits 0-9. For example, make sure you can successfully input and download "$10,222.64" before publishing a question that asks for a large dollar value.
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Rating grids can be thought of as an extension of the “multiple choice/choose many” question type. Instead of checking yes or no for each option, you could ask respondents to rank their top three preferences out of a list of ten. Be careful: this gets unwieldy quickly with too many options, and the resulting data can be difficult.
III. Further Tips and Process
Do not design your survey within the web interface of your survey software. Revisions and reordering will be frustratingly slow and awkward. It is much better to write out questions with pencil and paper, or at most a word processing package. Only when it is near ready to go, and you have at least verified what question types are best to use, should you transfer the questions into the online survey framework.
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Whenever possible, arrange a test run of your survey with 3 - 6 people who are similar to your respondent pool. Arrange to talk with them afterwards, and make sure they do most of the talking.
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Be sure to start early. The surest way to end up with embarrassing typos, ineffective questions or broken invitation links is to be rushed. Starting early allows you to review and test your survey. Just because these services make it technically possible to put out a rushed survey doesn’t mean that you should.
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Almost every online survey involves sending invitations by email. Test this email - its subject line, text, and links - as you would any email announcement. You especially want to make sure that a link to the survey itself shows in the first screenful of email text.
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Be careful about sending reminder emails. If your survey software has an option to send reminder emails only to people who haven’t responded yet, use it. In any case, don’t send more than two reminders, or you’ll alienate your constituents.
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On a final page, next to any demographic questions, give respondents the opportunity to get more involved in your organization - for example, with a checkbox allowing them to subscribe to an e-Newsletter.
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Arthur Prokosch created, analyzed and provided troubleshooting expertise for online surveys while serving as TSNE’s online services manager for several years.
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