Survey Wording

A survey is a set of questions or statements to which participants give responses. A survey provides one of the best methods to obtain a large amount of data from participants. In this manner, survey data can provide a quantitative, qualitative, and/or numeric description of trends, attitudes, or opinions of a population by studying a sample of that population. The wording of the items of the survey is important because different words can generate different answers. When writing survey questions, researchers must take into consideration the stimulus function of the prompt. Survey questions should invoke a commonly understood concept and ask for a reaction or evaluation of that concept using commonly understood words and phrases. This entry provides some general considerations about survey ...