Why the length and the order of the questions in your survey are important

The survey’s purpose and target group have a great deal to say for how long the survey can and should be. If the target group does not have a strong relationship with your organization and/or the purpose of the survey (for example, pop-up surveys on a website), you cannot expect a great deal of patience to answer a long questionnaire. If the survey is conducted internally in your organization, for example, there is a much lower threshold for responding, and a lot more patience for using a great deal of time to respond. Avoid including questions that only provide ”nice to know” information. It is recommended that you conduct short, frequent surveys linked to concrete events (processbased), instead of comprehensive and less frequent surveys. One way of cutting down the questionnaire is to upload the background information on respondents along with their email addresses. In this way you include the important information in the analyses and avoid having to ask specifically for this information. Examples of this type of information are gender, age, customer type and which department the respondent belongs to.

Start the questionnaire with simple questions, preferably about the respondent him/herself, such as gender or age (if this has not been uploaded as background information beforehand). Then you can continue with questions that are meant to give answers in relation to the survey’s key purpose. If some of the questions are sensitive, threatening or inflammatory in nature, ask these at the end of the main group of questions (See model p 9). In the closing of the questionnaire you can have questions that sum up, for example an open-ended question that provides the opportunity to give more general comments and input. At the same time, it is important that the questions follow a logical sequence, for example, you should not ask a question about what type of car the respondent drives, if they have already answered in a previous question that they do not have a car. 

Structuring the questions like this renders good flow and rhythm to the questionnaire, and it also provides greater potential for getting answers to the sensitive and/or demanding questions.