I wrote:
: You ought to allow users to have the opinions that they have - even if
: those opinions include 'don't know' or 'don't care' (or
: both).
:
: The answer options you offer should depend solely on the answers that your
: users want to give - not upon how many users there are.
:
: If you don't know what answers your users want to give, then interview them
: to find out before running your survey. And by the way -
: you should do that anyway (i.e., interview some users first) if you want
: anything like good results from your survey.
:
:
And Chiwah asked:
: Do you mean that when a user chooses neutral for a question, it has a
: meaning? And if most of my users choose neutral, it means that my question
: is wrongly formulated? Then in both case should I interview them to know why
: they choose the neutral option?
:
: But in this case, does that mean that I should include for each question a
: checkbox asking if they don't care, don't know and if they felt sometime one
: aspect or another?
:
Possibly. It is definitely the case that users choose 'neutral' for many
reasons other than that they are neutral.
It is also definitely the case that you should interview users on the topics
that you want to survey. Surveys aren't a way of
finding out users' opinions. They are a way of finding out how opinions are
distributed in a population. If you choose the wrong
opinions to ask them about, you will get poor results.
For example, a classic way to get poor results is to ask users a series of
questions on a topic that they don't know about or don't
care about.
But it's not necessarily a good idea to include specific checkboxes for 'don't
know' and 'don't care' with _each_ question. It might
be that they don't know or don't care about the whole topic. It might be that
don't know is a commonly held view for some of your
questions, with don't care being rare - but that don't care is common for other
questions, and don't know is rare. It might be that
'do have a view but don't want to give it to you' is a common opinion.
The only way to find out is to interview some users to get a feeling for the
types and ranges of opinions that they do have. Then
you construct your questions. Then you test your questionnaire, and interview
the test participants about it. By this point you have
a good chance of getting a decent questionnaire put together and that's half
the battle of a survey.
(The other half of the battle of a survey is deciding what you want to find out
about in the first place, getting a good sampling
strategy, analysing the pilot and actual data, and reporting, and doing
something about what you find).
Aside: one classic mistake people make is to think: we don't have time to do
any face-to-face user research such as usability
testing or field studies - we'll survey them instead'. But in fact, a good
survey is at least 10, and sometimes nearer 100, times
harder and more time-consuming than a few field studies or a bit of usability
testing.
A second aside: I use the term 'survey' to mean the end-to-end process of
gathering user data or opinions using a predetermined set
of questions, including the process of deciding what the questions should be. I
use 'questionniare' to mean the predetermined set of
questions itself. Many survey methodologists use the term 'instrument' instead
of 'questionnaire'.
Best,
Caroline Jarrett
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
07990 570647
Effortmark Ltd
Usability - Forms - Content
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