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Survey questionnaires are less standardized because the questions they are designed to answer vary far more. Developing a good survey questionnaire requires careful work on six distinct steps: a) defining the purpose of the survey and what will be included, b) selecting an appropriate form of questionnaire, c) deciding whether to use open-ended questions, closed-ended questions, or some mix of both, d) setting the order of questions, e) setting the wording of each question, and f) doing a “pretest” and “pilot” of the questionnaire to be sure that actual respondents understand and react to it as the researchers assume they will.
Defining the purpose starts from realization that surveys can be used to attain a number of research goals. Some surveys are used to develop descriptive information about a population of individuals or some other unit. Questions must be focused on getting the information desired. Other surveys are used to test one or more causal hypotheses about why people hold particular views or act in some way. The hypothesis will determine the question content since the researcher will want data conforming challenging the hypothesis. If a student of voting behavior claims that veterans in a country vote for conservative parties and there are no lists of veterans available, then the questionnaire must include questions about whether the respondent is a vateran as well as on how the respondent voted in the last election. In both types of project, the questions can range from the very factual (“when were you born?” “have you been to the UK in the past five years?” “when do you get up on a workday?”) to the very judgmental (“how would you rate GW Bush’s performance as president?” “does the Israel lobby have too much influence over US policy in the Middle East?).
There are two main types of questionnaires: self-completion questionnaires handout, mail (or e-mail) surveys that respondents fill out and return to the researcher, and interview questionnaires that an interviewer follows in direct phone or face-to-face contact with respondents (I suppose instant messaging could also be used, but am not aware of anyone using it yet). Self-completion questionnaires can be used for a short set of easily-understood questions; structured interviews, in which all of the questions are set in advance and the interviewer may not deviate from the list (the protocol) allow a trained researcher to ask more complex questions. Sometimes researchers use unstructured interviews allowing respondents to talk about things in the order they come into his or her head; sometimes the use a combination of structured and unstructured parts on a single questionnaire.
The particular questions used on a structured or an unstructured questionnaire can be open-ended or closed-ended. Open-ended questions allow respondents to reply in their own words. Closed-ended (sometimes called close-ended) questions ask the respondent to choose among a preset array of responses. A question asking you whether you strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, or have no opinion is a closed-ended question. A question asking you to describe President Bush's job performance with the first word or phrase that comes to your mind is open-ended. Open-ended responses are harder to code because they are not returned to the researcher in a standard format but they can pick up additional information. Some questionnaires use both types of question. Company “exit interviews” with employees leaving for another job often includes questions like “if there was one thing you could change in the job, what would it be?” as well as questions like rate the safety of the company’s various workspaces on a one (best) to five (worst) scale.
The order of questions on a self-completed form or in an interview can make a difference because earlier questions “prime” a respondent’s mind by suggesting a particular context or putting the respondent in a particular state of mind. This priming can have any of several effects. One of the better known is the consistency effect, which stems f