Questionnaire by Committee: The Art of Survey Collaboration
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Oct 20, 2010
The more important a survey is, the more people want to make sure it includes the questions they need answered. And, as a corollary, the longer it has been since your organization has surveyed this audience, the more people want to contribute!
Key to the success of designing a questionnaire by committee is being clear on the survey goals. Make sure that everyone on the team is clear about what the Essential Question is that is being researched. This will help keep the questionnaire focused.
Different groups have different styles of collaboration. Your group may want an in-person kickoff meeting to brainstorm questions, may want to handle it through a web conference, or may simply want to start an email thread soliciting ideas. Some groups want to start with a blank slate, while other groups hate a blank page and want to start with some questionnaire, any questionnaire! For such groups, start with the last similar survey that was fielded or start with a draft questionnaire created in Word by the project manager for the purposes of stimulating discussion. Question libraries and other past surveys can provide inspiration for certain questions.
Good questionnaires don’t skip around: respondents find it confusing to go back and forth about similar topics they have already discussed. Make sure that you have a topic outline that you can hang new questions off of.
The project manager will then be tasked with consolidating all submissions for questions, dropping them into the outline where appropriate. This can be done manually, but many enterprise survey systems, including Vovici Survey Workbench, have supported questionnaire collaboration for years. That draft questionnaire from Word can be easily imported into Survey Workbench—and, let’s face it, many groups are most comfortable collaborating with Word first, thanks to its excellent revision markup and annotation system.
Once the questionnaire has been imported, it can be shared with survey co-authors, each of whom can add survey questions, as well as use a collaboration pane to add comments and questions to one another. The advantage of this is that the questionnaire is kept in sync with each individual’s edits, removing any difficulties with version control.
Eventually a “last call” for questions should go out. After this last call, the project manager will see that many contributors have added questions that don’t directly address the Essential Question that is being researched. Fielding all these questions will result in a lower survey completion rate. To minimize questionnaire length, many of these questions will have to be postponed to a future survey. If you are the project manager for the survey, don’t present it as deleting these questions so much as postponing them; later, use the removed questions to set a research agenda for future surveys.
Many of the questions will have been inserted into the survey by business users without a research background. In fact, a few EFM systems support an Assisted Survey Author mode specifically so that such users can create draft questionnaires but not publish them. The project manager should have a market researcher carefully review the survey instrument to rewrite questions as appropriate. Writing objective survey questions takes a formal background in survey research.
Once the questionnaire has been rewritten to follow research best practices, it should then be circulated back to the team for approval. After a few iterations of changes and reviews, a collaborative “give and take”, your questionnaire will finally be ready to be fielded, and you will be well on your way to getting your team the answers they need.
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