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Public Opinion Quarterly 10— So, it's important not to ask more questions than are absolutely necessary for answering research questions. A good rule of thumb is to consider your target audience and when they'll be taking the survey. Think about how much time they'll be willing to volunteer for this activity and take note of the difficulty for each question. The harder the question is, the more time it'll take to complete.
For most companies, the ideal number of questions you'll want to include is less then A couple of sources have tested this theory to determine an ideal survey length. Read on for their results. SurveyMonkey took a random sample of about K surveys ranging in length from one to 30 questions. It analyzed the average time it took each respondent to complete the survey and placed the results in the chart below. Source: SurveyMonkey. As you can see, as question count increases the average seconds spent per question decreases.
That doesn't mean that longer surveys will always provide quick answers as there are other factors that can affect this data -- type of survey, the importance of the survey, target audience, etc. However, as shown below, the average time spent on each question in surveys longer than 30 questions is almost half that of surveys with fewer than 30 questions. And, these completion rates were lower for customer-related surveys versus school or work surveys.
She created an experiment with the following five types of surveys, ranging in length and difficulty:. Source: Researchscape. She ranked difficulty on a variety of conditions, such as ratings easy versus rankings difficult and agree or disagree easy versus pick one statement difficult.
These conditions helped her construct surveys in varying levels of difficulty, which then elicited the following results:. As you can see, survey difficulty, and not just length, affected completion rates.
One can presume that it's the difficulty of a survey that causes abandonment more so than length, since a survey of 24 easy questions has an 89 percent completion rate, while a survey of 24 difficult questions has an 82 percent completion rate.
Keeping this in mind, it might be better to simplify your survey before cutting its length. As shown in the SurveyMonkey research, it's better to maintain a survey with less than 30 questions.
This way, you can incorporate some difficult questions among your easier ones to garner more interesting insights without having a large impact on your completion rate. Now that you know how long your survey should be, it's time to decide on survey questions.
Originally published Sep 16, AM, updated June 15 These guidelines take into account the fact that as questionnaire length increases, the ability of respondents to provide valid and reliable answers to each question decreases. Simultaneously, response validity i. Over decades of academic and professional research practice, researchers have found that following the rules of thumb below for length of interview generally ensures questionnaires are kept sufficiently short to collect high-quality responses from all respondents to all questions, while still providing sufficient room for thorough questioning on most topics of interest to researchers and their clients.
If your pre-testers can complete the entire questionnaire in an identical or similar context to that in which you are ultimately planning to field it, then chances are, most of your actual target respondents will be able to do the same.
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