Research Tips
Web Surveys
Web surveys offer some advantages over traditional self-administered questionnaires. These include:
- The fact that respondents see only questions that pertain to them and not those that don’t (this eliminates confusion that can arise as a result of skip patterns in traditional questionnaires).
- The order of questions or response categories can be altered to ensure that this ordering is not influencing the results.
- Pictures and sounds can be incorporated.
- It’s easy to provide instructions and other information without cluttering up the questionnaire, through the use of pop-up windows and hyperlinks.
- There’s no need for the respondent to remember to mail in a completed questionnaire.
Of course, Web surveys have a downside too. They may not be effective when a large proportion of the target population doesn’t have access to the Web and drawing a representative sample of Web users can be difficult in some situations.