More on Question Tone

In the last article, we discussed the benefits of starting your survey off with simple, easy to answer questions that get the respondent in the mood to answer the remainder of your survey. These include building rapport, gaining the advantage of trust, and improving response rate by helping the survey appear simple to complete. Still, as with most areas of survey research, there are some potential downsides.

These include: Less Useful Data People drop out of surveys with regularity. For some researchers, it may be important to have a larger sample for certain questions. If you ask less important questions first as a way of easing the person into the survey, and they drop out after the easy questions are completed, that data may not be useful to you.

Increasing Length You need to have easy questions in your survey in order to ask easy questions. If you don’t have any questions that could be described as “easy,” then you’re increasing the length of your survey in such a way that you may experience a higher than normal dropout rate later. It’s usually a bad idea to increase the length of your survey, especially if you are adding questions that may not have benefit.

Despite these weaknesses, it still may be important for you to provide a few easier questions in a friendly tone when you start your survey. There are too many benefits for your data collection that a friendly tone addresses, and the downsides to starting a survey off with harsh, personal questions are likely to have a greater effect on your data.

But make sure that you are not asking easy questions for the sake of asking easy questions. Try to find ways to ease people into your survey that will help you get the most accurate results at the highest response rate. If you are testing your survey beforehand, you may find that all you need is a good introduction, or there may be a way to alter the wording of “harsh” questions that will still be easy for the respondent to answer.

Regardless, setting the time of your survey is important, and while you may not always get useful answers for analysis if the respondent drops out, asking a few easy questions to start off the survey may be the tool you need to ease them into it.