Don’t miss these 9 important tips for creating a survey

Before you start creating your survey, you should make sure that no participants are excluded from taking the online survey for technical reasons. Therefore, the technical requirements should be based on the lower level of possibilities in the target group (amount of data to be transmitted, use of graphics, use of programming techniques and languages). Acceptable loading times and good readability at different screen sizes/resolutions must be taken into account. When implementing scales, question texts or answer options, it is necessary to ensure that all options are fully visible. Make sure, for example, that the “don't know” option is visible on the screen – otherwise your results could be distorted. Once you have taken these points into account, you can start programming the survey.

• Formulate questions briefly and concisely – avoid information overload.

• Don’t ask leading questions – stay as neutral as possible.

• Avoid ambiguities and unnecessary technical terms.

• Avoid double negations (example: What are you trying to avoid in your diet? – Not eating meat.).

• Don’t ask two questions in one question (example: What do you think about long-distance travel or short trips? – This should be split into two questions).

• Design online surveys so that all respondents understand the questions in the same way.

• In the case of closed questions, the answer categories must be complete and should not overlap.

• Give clear instructions for answering the questions.

• Do not ask questions on topics that are not known to the respondents.

Source: Gräf, Lorenz. 2010: Online-Befragung. Eine praktische Einführung für Anfänger. Lit Verlag. Berlin