Too many answer options

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 Lobke Kuijs.

After finishing my degree in communication science last year, I was happy that I could start working as a research expert. During those months I learned a lot about setting up and programming questionnaires, reliable questionnaire techniques that are also fun for respondents and much more.

In order to see what kind of research other market research agencies are doing, I fill in their surveys about two to three times a week. After filling out some of these, there was something that caught my eye. Programming software nowadays are quite handy, smart and easy which can contribute to the respondent friendliness of a survey. But what I unfortunately saw a lot, were long answer lists. Sometimes they even consisted of two columns which I had to scroll through and where it was difficult to find the right answer for me. This has led me to filling in the wrong answer or getting really annoyed, which eventually did not have a positive influence on my answers in the questions that followed.

Take the next example for instance. It is quite a long list with options, but it isn’t even the longest list I have seen. I do play a sport but not one that is on the list, so I clicked on ‘other’. The next question was ‘Which sport do you play at a sports club?’, which included the whole list of sports again. I struck this as unnecessary because in the previous question I had already indicated that I do not play any of the sports stated on the list. It is only a small effort to programme the questionnaire in such a way that the previous answers of a respondent are taken into account.

Which of the sports below do you practice?

American football, Athletics, Badminton, Baseball, Basketball, Bowling, Boxing, Cricket, Cycling, Darts, Extreme sports, Fighting sports (such as karate, Kungfu, taekwondo, etc.), Golf, Gymnastics, Handball, Hockey, Ice skating, Jumping, Korfball, Marathon running, Motorsport, Mountain biking, Rugby, Sailing, Skiing, Snowboarding, Soccer, Squash, Surfing, Swimming, Table tennis, Tennis, Volleyball, Water polo, Wrestling, Other, None of the above

Doing this makes a survey much more pleasant for the respondent, which in turn also provides more reliable answers. So, my advice for anyone in (online) research is to make your questionnaire as respondent friendly as possibly by using previous answers in follow-up questions.