The humble survey is still one of the most powerful tools for higher education institutions to understand how an audience thinks. Be it attracting students or engaging donors, evaluating changing trends in perceptions and opinions is critical to making good decisions and creating engaging communication. With user-friendly online survey builders available to anyone, it’s easy to think the artistry of a good survey is a thing of the past, like robotic phone calls or that annoying person flagging you down at the mall.
Survey design is truly an art directed by human psychology. How you ask questions matters. Even how a survey is arranged can dash it from the pinnacle of research methodologies to a worthless set of numbers collecting dust on a shelf. Luckily, if we understand human psychology, we can avoid survey pitfalls. For example…
1. We perceive vertically oriented text as discrete and horizontal text as a continuum
Consider these two images of a mock survey question created in two different ways:
