This article will consider the different types of research questions and when to use them individually. It will also cover what you will need to avoid when compiling survey questions. Finally, the final section will provide answers to some common questions. Getting this right is important to keep customers happy and to promote good products and services.
Types of Research Questions
So what kinds of research questions should you use? There are a few things to consider here that include coming up with a set of different questions. It is important to keep them separate and not to ask for two things at once. Take time to ask questions so that they do not take sides and do not pay.
Finally, the types of survey questions depend on the time frame, objectives and audience of your survey.
“Keep your questionnaire short,” wrote Nicole R Rodriguez, Director of Interdependence Public Relations. Keep the answer list shorter to reduce the bias of the long list that does not fit on the screen.
Open Survey Questions
Open-ended questions are common. This allows respondents to respond in the form of a free forum. This is not based on statistics and there are no response options set. They are open-ended and independent research questions.
In short, open-ended questions leave room for a wide range of answers. These cannot be answered yes or no. Or, a question such as “How do you see the needs of your company? This applies to sales teams.
When to Use Open Questions
These types of questions work best when you know how to use them. Here are a few examples of when you might use these questions for research purposes.
They work well when you start testing. A new company or launcher needs to learn about customer needs. Open feedback options help you improve customer satisfaction. These types of questions also illuminate where you need to improve.
Research questions like these have a downside.
They took extra effort to respond. Remember that there are no selected answers and no scale questions. The answer options here require more thought. Respondents often avoid this for that reason.
The answers you get take longer to analyze than the wide variety of options.
Morgan Molnar, Director of Product Marketing, SurveyMonkey Market Research Solutions, gave a few other examples.
A good example is:
“Can you tell me about your experience?”
When to Use Test Questions
“They are always at the beginning of your market research,” Molnar said.
Firmographic Questions
“When you do B2B research, you will want to include firmographic questions to understand things like job title, job level, department, company size, or respondent industry,” Molnar said.
Closed Survey Questions
There are other types of research questions to consider. Closed questions are an easy option you can use. This includes highly defined response options. The type of response found here is usually multiple choice. However, they can include:
Scale rating questions. It is best to include a few good options and a few negative ones. These are a lot of multiple choice questions. A typical example would be asking respondents to choose a rating scale from one to ten.
Frequently Asked Questions. These are good for graphs because there are only a few answers. An example of this type of question would be: What browser do you like? This has a number of multiple options like Google, Safari or Chrome.
One of these could be:
Did you find our service useful?
When to use Closed Survey Questions
These are good at the start of surveys. They are easy to answer and encourage people to go through the whole survey. This is great if you want statistics to create graphs.
