Questionnaires – Targeting and Choosing Good Questions
Which People to Target
Depending on what your questionnaire is asking, your target population should be those that it directly involves. If you want to find out about peoples attitudes to, say, a new food product, you would issue your questionnaire to people at supermarkets. If you want to know the likely demand for your proposed accountancy service, you may target new and existing small businesses and even accountants themselves (only if there was some benefit to them or their clients and if it did not affect their own profitability).
If your target audience covers a large percentage of the population, then it is important that you sample different areas so that you get fair and accurate results as one area may have completely different attitudes to the product/service than others.
Types of Questions
A questionnaire that has a number of one-off questions (with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers) are known as CLOSED questions and are acceptable to include in your questionnaire as long as they balance with the number of CLOSED questions: those that offer a short or multiple choice answer.
OPEN question examples:
1. What is your opinion of our new product?
2. How do you think the product can be improved?
CLOSED question examples:
1. Do you shop here often? – (more informed question could be: how many times…)
2. Do you use our service often? – (more informed question could be: how often…)
The other types of questions that can be categorized are DIRECT and INDIRECT questions and will overlap with those above. Direct questions are those that the interviewee will answer with their own personal behaviour and indirect questions will be answered with the interviewee’s opinions of other people’s behaviour.
DIRECT question examples:
1. Which newspaper do YOU buy the most?
2. How much would YOU be prepared to pay for this product?
INDIRECT question examples:
1. Do you think that OTHER people would buy this product?
2. Which newspaper do you think is most popular in the UK?
These questions allow you to gain information that you may not pick up from asking direct questions based on individual behaviour. For example, the interviewee may buy a certain product and comment how good it is, yet they believe another product is more popular with the general public.
Example QuestionnaireArticle Index
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