A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions (or other types of prompts) for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study.
Open-ended, long-term questions offer the respondent the ability to elaborate on their thoughts.
Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of survey tools in that they are cheap, do not require as much effort from the questioner as verbal or telephone surveys, and often have standardized answers that make it simple to compile data.
[citation needed] There typically is a flow that should be followed when constructing a questionnaire in regards to the order that the questions are asked.
Warm-ups are simple to answer, help capture interest in the survey, and may not even pertain to research objectives.
Also, when completing an online questionnaire, the progress bars lets the respondent know that they are almost done so they are more willing to answer more difficult questions.
[15] A theoretical framework is also provided by sociolinguistics, which states that to achieve the equivalent communicative effect as the source language, the translation must be linguistically appropriate while incorporating the social practices and cultural norms of the target language.
For example, unlike interviews, the people conducting the research may never know if the respondent understood the question that was being asked.
Random errors are caused by unintended mistakes by respondents, interviewers, and/or coders.
Thus, the exact formulation of a survey question and its scale is crucial, since they affect the level of measurement error.