Research Tips
Integrating Information Requirements and Data Collection Methods
Have you ever agreed to participate in a phone survey only to find that the questions being asked are long and complex or there are long lists of difficult to remember response choices? Besides being annoying for the respondent, this type of thing is likely to produce invalid and unreliable results. That’s because there is not a good match between the types of questions being asked and the means of data collection. For example, printed or Web surveys are better than phone surveys for long involved questions or questions with a lot of different response categories. When such questions are used in phone surveys, there is a risk that people won’t fully understand or will forget things and will be too embarrassed or impatient to ask to have them repeated. On the Web or in print, respondents can take the time they need to read the questions themselves and read them again if necessary.
Of course, there may be situations in which data must be collected in a particular way. For example phone surveys may be a good option if results are required very quickly and Web use is not common among the population being surveyed. Nonetheless, if a particular method of data collection must be used then the whole survey design needs to take that into account using question types and response formats that are appropriate for that type of data collection.