Pre-testing and piloting of your questionnaire at an early stage is highly advisable.  A useful article

Improving Survey Quality Through Pre-Testing

stresses this point. The article also provides a range of techniques which you can choose from.

In addition to testing your group with a cohort of individuals, it is well worth making use of an internet based software tool for assessing the clarity of your questions.  One such tool is the Question Understanding Aid (QUAID).

You require to register with the site but registration is free.  In return you will receive access to a facility for analyzing your questions according to the following five categories:

• unfamiliar technical terms

• imprecise or vague relative terms

• vague or ambiguous nooun-phrases

• complex syntax

• working memory overload

Take the time to check your questions in this way, thus raising the chance of getting accurate responses!

 

In designing survey questions, the cognitive interview process is an excellent means of assessing whether respondents understand your questions as asking exactly what you intended them to.  Relevant techniques include the think-aloud procedure where pilot respondents share what is going through their mind as they attempt to answer a particular questions and verbal probing techniques whereby, for example, pilot respondents are asked to explain what they understand by specific terms within a question. There are structured and well researched methods for applying these techniques (which include a variety of approaches).  You are strongly recommended to take a look at resource

Cognitive Interviewing: A “How to Guide”

for some examples and recommendations on how to apply them in practice.

Before or after piloting your questionnaire, you should find the paper-based Questionnaire Appraisal System QAS-99 very useful. The resources available within this resource  include a step-by-step check list for your questionnaire, examples illustrating the application of this check-list to find flaws in questions which have been designed previously and some examples for you to try.  There should be something applicable to every conceivable questionnaire in the above resource. Please take a look!

 

 

 

Pre-Testing: Questionnaire Appraisal Schemes and Techniques by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.