Put Important Survey Questions First

When it comes to survey design, you have the option of deciding where you want your questions to be within the survey. Often researchers mix up their questions based on themes, putting questions in an order that makes the most sense for their research. But there may be some benefit to putting the most important questions in your survey first, rather than interspersing them throughout the survey design. Here are three benefits of putting the most important questions first in your survey.

Possible Sample Size Improvements There is no denying the importance of a large sample. The more respondents you have, the more reliable your analysis will be.

But getting a good response rate can be difficult. Even the most well-crafted emails and research design can fall short of attracting a huge number of responses, and while you may have a “good enough” sample to run some analysis, every additional response helps ensure you can draw conclusions from that data confidently. Since survey dropout is a huge problem, putting the most important questions first may be able to improve the size of your sample.

This won’t work for all research, but data collection still occurs when the respondent answers a few questions and quits. If your most important questions are first, you may be able to use that data accordingly. Question Effects It’s possible for the experience of answering one question to affect the experience of answering another question.

This is less likely to occur when you have questions in the beginning, as the respondent has not answered enough questions yet to be affected. Habituation and Central Tendency Both habituation and central tendency bias are two serious problems that affect the quality of your data – problems that survey researchers ignore far too often. When the most important questions are first in the survey, it is much less likely that these issues will affect your data.

For a lot of market and customer research, putting the most important questions first may not be possible. You may need questions to be asked first before you can even analyze the data that is most important to you. You may also not want to turn respondents off from taking your survey by asking questions that are too tough or personal right away. But some research should allow you to choose where you want the questions to be in the survey, and because of dropout, the effects of questions on other answers, and answer biases, you may benefit from asking the most important questions in your survey first before moving on to the less important questions.