Why to Avoid Dichotomous Questions

While you may work from a template, chances are you are creating your own survey questionnaire. That questionnaire can be filled with any number of questions designed to help you learn more about the customer’s views. They are also going to be answers that your customers have to choose from.

Some of these questions may be open ended, but most are going to have choices for the customers to pick from. You’re in charge of deciding what answers you want to analyze. Although they may seem common and easy to analyze, it is a good idea to avoid questions that have simple yes/no answers.

Dichotomous questions (Yes/No) may seem simple, but they suffer from problems both on the part of the survey respondent and in terms of analysis. Yes/No questions often force customers to choose between options that may not be that simple, and may lead to a customer deciding on an option that doesn’t truly encapsulate their feelings. There are many examples of how this can occur.

Say that two customers are asked a question such as “Do you use X product?” Both customers own the product, and both customers have only used the product one time before storing it and never using it again. Customer 1 Thinks: “Well, I do own the product, and even though I don’t use it, I did use it that one time, so I’ll say ‘yes.’” Customer 2 Thinks: “Well, even though I do own the product, I only used it that one time, so I’ll say ‘no.’” Two customers, two identical scenarios, two different answers, because the customer was not provided with an answer that is able to help remove some of the ambiguity. Now, not only will you have two different answers for arguably the same response, but you have the “yes” person grouped in with the people that use a product regularly, and the “no” person grouped in with people that may not use the product at all.

Dichotomous answers are too constricting, and don’t lend themselves well towards analysis. In the above example, by providing customers with progressively increasing options (I have never used the product, I have used the product but do not use it regularly, I use the product somewhat regularly, etc.), the customers would have had a much easier time coming to a decision, and even in the event that they were still unsure how to answer it correctly, the answers they choose should be “closer” so as not to disrupt your research.