Are Online Surveys Asking The Right Questions?

Surveys are currently the most commonly used data collection method for marketers, according to MarketResearchCareers.com. On top of that, more marketing dollars are spent on online surveys than on any other survey research methodology. When it comes to conducting primary research online, a web survey may be the most convenient and efficient medium available to marketing professionals. We have all probably sent out a web survey to our peers for one reason or another, but how much thought have we put into determining what types of information gathering are best suited to online survey research?

When pursuing certain kinds of data, surveys can often lead to misleading results. In his small business marketing column, Mark Healy suggests that when people are asked to give reasons for their past behavior the responses tend to be contrived and inaccurate. The reason may lie in the fact that a good portion of our decision making is irrational. Consequently we have a tendency to rationalize behavior that we find irrational in hindsight. This is not to say that surveys are not at all useful in characterizing consumer behavior. When it comes to gathering quantifiable facts, surveys are ideal. The key is to ask the right kinds of questions.


Read the full article here.


In a follow-up article, Healy goes into more detail about the types of information gathering for which surveys are appropriate. Surveys are great when it comes to answering the questions, Who, What, Where and When. These are purely factual and require little or no judgment. Why and How, on the other hand, involve opinions and are not easily quantifiable. It would be difficult to provide adequate multiple choice responses for a Why question, for example, because the possibilities are infinite. Leaving an open-ended response option is a common workaround, but this technique can create problems when assembling the final survey results, especially with a large sample size. For a survey to be effective, suitable questions must be combined with a sound survey design that asks those questions in a way that will generate the best results.


Read the follow-up article here.