Respondent’s memory

Research is a profession that should be carried out by experts. The biggest threat to quick and cost-efficient research is that the quality is almost always suffering. DVJ wants research to remain good. Even when it is quick and against low cost. For this reason, we regularly share examples of mistakes and best practises in the market. We share our thoughts and possible solutions to improve research. By following these tips, we can make research better. This time the honour belonged to Research Expert Tamara van Doorn.

Memory in questionnaires

Curiosity is the start of all research. Doing research gives us the opportunity to understand specific areas better via people and figure out why developments are occurring the way they do. In this urge for curiosity we tend to pile up a lot of questions to gather all the information we want.

During this process of creating a questionnaire, the limitations of a respondent’s memory are sometimes forgotten. It happens that multiple questions are asked at once or, what I recently encountered when filling in a questionnaire, a question asking me about my purchasing behaviour from the past 2 years.

Which of the following products have you bought for personal use in the past 2 years? Please select all that apply.

Cigarettes, Shag, Cigars, Smoke-free tobacco, Cigarillo’s, Electronic cigarettes, Other, None

Although interesting, it is not possible to answer this question in a valid way, simply because I cannot remember what I did or did not purchase over such a long period of time.

In this case, the researcher’s curiosity conflicted with the quality of the data. Therefore, it would be better to always ask short, clear and simply worded questions to respondents which they can remember easily. Asking the right questions in the right way will lead to the answer you are looking for. And luckily there’s an easy way to prevent such mistakes. Although it seems obvious, it’s always helpful to remember that respondents are not researchers and we should keep questionnaires as user-friendly and easy as possible.