Research Tips

Be Specific

When writing survey questions, it generally pays to be specific as this helps prevent creating questions that are open to multiple interpretations.

For example, questions relating to attribute importance are frequently written in a way that leads to the possibility of multiple interpretations: questions say something like “please rate the importance of each of the following” and the respondent is then given a list of attributes and a scale with labels such as “very important”, “somewhat important”, etc. The problem is that when a question is worded this way it does not provide any indication of what the importance is in relation to.

If the survey was being done by a retailer the attributes might be things like the quality of service, the quality of products offered, the range of products, store hours, store cleanliness, etc. Importance in this situation could pertain to how important an attribute is in determining satisfaction with the most recent visit, how important it is in determining overall attitude toward the retailer, or how important it is in determining the respondent’s intention to buy from the same retailer again, etc.

Unless the question is specific about which meaning is intended, respondents will make their own interpretations and their answers may differ depending on which way they interpreted the question. These interpretations are likely to vary among respondents and some interpretations are likely to vary from the intended interpretation, which means that the resulting data will not be very useful and may be misleading.