Cross-Cultural Survey Design Tips

Continued from Part 1 Selecting survey questions can be a laborious process. Questions need to be designed in a way that guarantees that you are going to collect the data you need. For some, this can be difficult enough when simply completing a regular survey.

When you are also taking into account cross-cultural guidelines with regard to your questionnaire, it can become even more difficult. Below are five things that you should do to make sure that your survey is better prepared for possible cultural problems.

Follow Basic Survey Question Protocols There are several rules for selecting questions that come into play when you’re creating your surveys. You should make sure your questions are simple and follow a logical flow. You should avoid complicated language and questions that may have more than one answer, etc.

General survey question choice is already designed to make the questions as simple as possible to answer, which will help the questions work with cultural differences. Consider Translation Services for Diverse Populations Surveys that are expected to be delivered to customers that may not speak English as a first language may need to have translation options available.

However, these translation services need to be reputable, and you should consider checking them with native speakers to ensure they were translated correctly. Even good translation services can vastly screw up translations, simply due to cultural nuances. Establish Procedures For Question Testing As outlined in this article by the University of Michigan, you can decide on methods of testing your questions to make sure that they are collecting the data you want from each question.

There are many different ways to test each question and you should have guidelines ensuring they are accurately meeting your needs. Pretest Your Survey Sending out a pre-test of your survey is a good way to spot problems before you send out the actual test. You can spot possible issues with your data, and see if it differs from what you’d expect in some cultural groups.

Be Willing To Question Your Data Even the best designed surveys with the best intentions may get unexpected outcomes due to problems with choosing cross cultural questions. So if your data reveals something odd in the survey, see if there is some sort of cultural cause. It may also be a good idea to provide plenty of qualitative sections on your survey as well, so that people from these cultures can notify you if they noticed something odd or were confused by a question.

You need your data to be as accurate as possible, and the only way to do that is to account for cultural differences as best you can. In many cases this is as simple as making the language of the survey as easy to understand as possible, but sometimes you will need to take further steps to make sure your survey is collecting data accurately.