Page 133 -

5.6 Developing survey questions 119

another community member suggesting participation in a survey may come with a
high level of credibility.

5.6 DEVELOPING SURVEY QUESTIONS
Once the goal and strategy for using a survey has been decided upon, the next step
is to develop a survey tool. As mentioned earlier, some describe the survey tool it-
self as a “questionnaire.” The main challenge is to develop well-written, nonbiased
questions. The questions in a survey can often lead to answers that do not repre-
sent what the researchers were actually asking. Since a majority of surveys are self-
administered, they must be easy enough to understand that users can fill them out by
themselves. In a limited number of situations, an interviewer may ask survey ques-
tions. For more information on interviews, read Chapter 8.
It is important to understand that there are two different structures in a survey: the
structure of single questions and the structure of the entire survey. More information
on overall survey structure is presented in Section 5.7. Most survey questions can
be structured in one of three ways: as open-ended questions, closed-ended ques-
tions with ordered response categories, or closed-ended questions with unordered
response categories (Dillman, 2000).

5.6.1 OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS

Open-ended questions are useful in getting a better understanding of phenomena,
because they give respondents complete flexibility in their answers. However, aside
from the obvious drawback of more complex data analysis, open-ended questions
must be carefully worded. Otherwise, they may lead to responses that either do not
really help researchers address the root question, or responses that simply do not
provide enough information. Consider the following open-ended question:
Why did you stop using the Banjee Software product?

This open-ended question provides no information about the possible causes;
instead it requires the respondent to think deeply about what the causes might be
(Dillman, 2000). The respondent may be too busy to come up with a complete re-
sponse or may simply say something like “I didn't like the software.” It is a very
broad question. More specific questions might be:
How did you feel about the usability (ease of use) of the Banjee software?
Did the Banjee software allow you to complete the tasks that you wanted to complete?

These questions address more specific topics: ease of use and task completion.
The respondents cannot simply answer “I didn't like it,” although they could just
answer “yes” or “no” to the second question. Perhaps another way to reword that
second question might be as:
What barriers did you face, in attempting to use the Banjee software to complete
your tasks?