Questionnaire Design Principles

We use accepted design principles to ensure that our questionnaires function as intended. These principles state that questionnaire items must:

• be related explicitly to particular analysis objectives;
• be understood by the survey respondents;
• ask for factual information or attitudes that respondents can recall from memory or retrieve from records;
• avoid response bias or other negative influences on respondents' decision processes;
• be formatted in a way that makes them useful to interviewer as well as respondents; and
• be formatted in a way that minimizes entry errors.