Best Practices for Writing Effective Questions

When writing a question, it is important to respect your respondents’ time and be clear about the information you are requesting. The following best practices can help you optimize survey completion rates while obtaining the most meaningful respondent feedback.

• Adopt an engaging tone—Speak respectfully to respondents. The more welcoming your language, the more likely your audience is to complete each question.
• Use common words—Choose your words carefully. To ensure comprehension and accuracy, it is best to assume that your respondents are not familiar with industry jargon and complex terminology. (One effective rule of thumb is to write for a sixth-grade reading level.)
• Keep questions specific and short—State each question in a way that is meaningful to your respondents and your analysis. Rephrase questions that are vague or verbose. When creating a choice question, clearly define its lowest and highest values. For example, on a scale of 1 to 5, what 1 means and what 5 means.
• Understand the goal of each question—Refine your questions to provoke the answers most meaningful to your analysis. A well-framed question increases the significance of your data.
• Limit the number of questions—Include only questions that are essential to your goal. If two questions would return similar answers, combine them to eliminate the redundancy. If you must include several questions that are similar in form and content, consider creating a matrix question to save space. When creating choice and matrix questions, keep the number of answer selections to a minimum while still accommodating all possible answers.
• Spell check your questions—Remember to spell check your questions using the Spelling option available on the ribbon.