2 minutes to read. By author Michaela Mora on September 5, 2019 Topics: Market Research, Online Survey Tools, Survey Design
At the root of survey gamification, we should have good, sound survey design principles. That’s the main message from Reg Baker’s presentation at the MR Festival organized by NewMR.
Baker follows the four-stage cognitive model proposed by Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski (2000). This model tries to explain how respondents process information and survey questions. Baker suggests it provides opportunities to create engaging surveys.
According to this model, when faced with survey questions respondents go through different phases: Comprehension, Retrieval, Judgement, and Response
In this phase, respondents try to understand the information, apply logic, and connect key terms. Survey design can help comprehension by:
Once a question is understood, respondents try to retrieve information from memory and fill the blanks. Survey design can make retrieval easier by:
Respondents go next to assess the relevance of the retrieved information, integrate the material, and draw inferences. Survey design can aid judgment by:
Finally, respondents have to categorize and edit their responses. Baker focuses here on the influence that question formatting may have in helping respondents formulate their answers. Question formatting can improve the response rate by:
There is a debate among market researchers about how to make the survey-taking experience more engaging and minimize abandonment rates. As a result, survey tool providers are racing to create different question formats (e.g. sliders, heatmaps, etc.), add interactive elements, and actual games in surveys.
Unfortunately, with the increase of DIY research done by inexperienced actors, the quality of survey design has declined. Although writing surveys look easy, writing good ones is not. Fun and cool question formats can’t compensate for ill-designed questions.
In short, I agree with Baker that the greatest improvement we need to engage respondents is in survey design.
(An earlier version of this article was originally published on November 3, 2011. The article was last updated and revised on September 5, 2019.)
Share on:
Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified about future articles
Subscribe and don’t miss anything!
Subscribe
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.