How to design questions that capture the right information?

The “right” information refers to balancing your intent & intentionality. Consider 3 questionnaire design factors:

1. Question format + ordering. Should the data be collected in an exact number, a range, or in categories? Can a question serve as “filter question” so people can skip questions that don’t apply to them, or does asking all questions of everyone enhance data quality?
2. Predefined answer choices. Are they too broad that you lose details, or too detailed that you’re bound to collapse some during data cleaning?
3. Pretest the questions with potential respondents to assess if question intent = how they’re being interpreted. This way, you can fix the problem questions or document possible anomalies. Be sure to retest to confirm your fixes do work better for the questionnaire design!

SEE ALSO:

How to refine skip patterns in a questionnaire?

How to resolve common usability issues?

What to do before pretesting data collection instruments?

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