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BRE Social Research Team – Getting the value from your questionnaire

Right team, we are starting a really exciting project wouldn’t it be great to get some feedback from potential users of our product?

I know, let’s do a survey!

Oh look, Wikihow, how to create a survey in 14 steps…with pictures?! Jackpot! Bish, bash, bosh, survey created and sent.

Recognise the above? We do! This is an all too common approach to social research and can lead to poor-quality surveys which waste a lot of time and can ultimately detract from the overall credibility of a project.

BRE’s social research team is comprised of experts on getting the best from your survey, saving time and cost as well as ensuring greater value to your project. A great survey attracts a higher response rate and ultimately provides you with clear, reliable and actionable insight. The value of this to your business lies in reduced risk when entering the market place as you have a greater knowledge of what it is the consumer wants.

What we want to get across is that time spent thinking about your questions in detail is time well spent. Utilising our experts in the social research team condenses the time required to assemble your survey and ensures that you can get your great survey out to the market quickly and efficiently.

 

What are the main things that are important when designing a survey, and how can we help you get these right?

  1. Unclear goals lead to vague results! Our team can help you think through and ascertain:
  • What your goal is…
  • What you want to accomplish from the survey as a whole and each individual question…
  • How you can use each bit of data and how this affects the decisions the survey is designed to help you make…
  1. An unfocused survey loses responses

We can help you focus your survey by keeping it short and to the point. Some questions are ‘nice to haves’ and simply add confusion to your objective. This can reduce responses and clarity of your data.

  1. Simple questions are the way forward.

It is easy to get bogged down in long questions steeped full of jargon and acronyms, and as the one immersed in the project, it can be hard to recognise this. We can help you clarify your questions to increase the validity of the responses you gain. Ultimately, if your respondent doesn’t understand the question, they won’t answer it correctly.

  1. Closed questions are your friend.

It can be tempting to ask open ended questions in order to gain deep feedback from your respondent, however, you can then be left with hundreds of unique answers which are acutely difficult to analyse. We can help you mould your questions into closed answer questions, bringing greater clarity to your responses and analysis and ultimately more actionable answers.

  1. Logical ordering.

This is incredibly important when it comes to getting accurate responses from your survey, it is essential to be able to assess whether certain questions will influence those later on. We can help you with checking the logic of your questions before you send it out to respondents.

 

Finally, one of the most important things our team can help you with is to test your survey and then test it and test it again! Sending out an incorrect survey to your respondents can invalidate the survey and really waste time.

If you are interested in finding out more from the Social Research Team at BRE (we conduct all types of research from quantitative surveys, to qualitative and experimental research) please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected] . We would love to hear from you. You can also look out for more posts from us looking in detail at the range of exciting work we get up to.