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The value of strong questionnaire design, complemented by the task of high-quality sample development, is not fully appreciated. Too often researchers relegate those two essential building blocks of market research to a status secondary to the analytics and presentation of results. Big mistake!

A strong questionnaire design and, specifically, conducting an audit to ensure quality, is the focus of this article.

Questionnaire Design

Research Axiom No. 1: You can never fully recover from a poorly written questionnaire.

No manipulation of data points, regardless of how cleverly done; no amount of analysis, regardless of how brilliantly executed; and no degree of interpretation, regardless of the intellectual insights, can save you from a poor research foundation. Your building will collapse as if shaken by an earthquake!

Questionnaire design is a task repeatedly given insufficient time and attention. Clients and research professionals alike often underestimate the effort it will take to develop a well-structured and concise research instrument.

What amazes me most? Project leaders relegate the task to a status depicted in this attitude: "Once the questionnaire is done, we can get on with the important stuff, like analysis and reporting."

The assumption that analysis work is the essence of the research, and the expectation that interpreting the results is where the mastery of research ultimately lies, is a mystery to me.

Have we not pounded the concept of garbage-in garbage-out into the heads of research students across the globe? Can new Internet tools substitute for critical thinking and the hard work of aligning the research instrument to the purpose of the study to answer the business questions that sponsors paid to learn?

If that sounds like a rant, I'm guilty as charged, but I will end it with an analogy: If you have not studied and then practiced writing poetry, would you expect to publish a book of poems simply because the VP of marketing asked you to? Designing a good-quality research instrument probably takes less talent than being a good poet, but it's close.

What does that have to do with questionnaire auditing? That's simple. If you work hard up front to create a great questionnaire, the audit will be quick and painless. If you don't... well, you already know the answer.

Questionnaire Auditing

Our research on research has shown that even experienced researchers are less diligent about quality than one would hope. Research and questionnaire design, in particular, require not only science but also art; and if the proper fundamentals are not applied, the product is less than artful.

The purpose of an audit is to help you avoid errors in structure and allow you to focus more on the art.

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Questionnaire Auditing: The Quality-Control Step You Cannot Afford to Skip

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Carey V. Azzara

Carey V. Azzara is a retired researcher and the author of Questionnaire Design for Business Research (Tate Publishing, 2010).