How to Create a New Survey Questionnaire

Rework your questions and question ordering to maximize effectiveness.

Survey questionnaires attempt to attain workable and honest feedback from the survey participants. Whether you need to create a survey at a restaurant to determine customer satisfaction or you must create a survey for a class assignment, the questions you ask and the order you ask them are integral to the survey's success. You must determine what exactly you need to find out in order to create the best survey with the most efficient design.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pen
• Survey test subjects

Instructions

1. Write down your objective or objectives on a sheet of paper. Visualizing your objective helps guide your question formulation for your new survey. For example, a question that may seem good at first may not help your research at all once you revisit your written objective. Keep the written objective visible at all times during the survey formulation process.

2. Determine how you will conduct the survey. Will it be telephone? Web survey? Mail questionnaire? Email questionnaire? Personal interview? Once you've decided, you can create your survey within the limitations of format, time and location.

3. Rank your objectives if you have more than one. This helps you determine how many questions you need to ask on each subject since you have limited resources and time. The objective with the highest priority gets the most questions.

4. Analyze the demographic taking your survey (i.e. doctors, lawyers, high school students, parents and so forth). Create a question format that your target group can easily answer and understand. For example, high school students may be less likely to answer open ended questions due to time limitations or disinterest. Simple "yes" or "no" questions are more accessible for this group.

5. Write down your questions and put them in the order you want to ask them. Review the questions for any typographical errors.

6. Test the questions on a test group of 20 people. Analyze the results and get feedback from the test subjects. Look for issues such as the creation of bias based on language or the order of the questions, the time it took to complete the questionnaire (either too short or too long) and the cost of producing the sample set.

7. Rework your questionnaire based on your analysis of the test subjects. Eliminate any bias and maximize efficiency by staying within you own time and resource limitations.

References

• Qualtrics University: How to Create a Survey
• ESurvey Pro: How to Create an Effective Survey Project Plan