Quantitative Data Collection: Select an appropriate platform for your questionnaire

This is the first issue of a two-part series on quantitative market research data collection. It explores considerations for choosing an appropriate survey platform. The December issue will address questionnaire design issues.

Your quantitative survey can be administered by Internet, telephone, or paper. Each platform has pros and cons; none fits every case. Knowing exactly what you hope to gain from your study—and how you plan to use your results—will help you determine which advantages are most important.

Internet

Web-based surveys allow respondents to self-administer a questionnaire at their leisure, making this an increasingly popular way to collect data from physicians and other hard-to-reach healthcare professionals. In addition, this platform supports complex question-skipping logic, randomization, and other features that facilitate efficiency. It also easily accommodates images, video, and other stimuli.

Moreover, this platform eliminates interviewer bias, since a computer asks questions the same way every time. And data collection is generally fast, in part because thousands of interviews can be completed simultaneously and participants enter responses directly into a computer. This minimizes survey-administration and data-processing costs.

A downside is that your sample must have convenient access to a computer and be comfortable using it, which makes it an inappropriate platform for some studies. Length is also a critical consideration for Internet surveys, since people are more likely to quit a questionnaire on the Web than if they’re talking with a good interviewer.

Telephone

A telephone platform makes rigorous respondent-screening processes easier to execute than the other two options. In addition, telephone interviews typically generate more complete answers, since people verbally respond to questions instead of writing. This is often a good way to probe complex subjects and test message recall, but it’s difficult to incorporate images into studies using a phone methodology.

While an interviewer can influence responses in phone interviews, two different tools are used to minimize this bias: Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) and the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. By automatically skipping questions and supporting other logic options, these systems facilitate complex questionnaires without requiring respondent access to the Internet. They can also control quotas, generate automatic call-back schedules, and perform other administrative tasks.

Paper

Paper surveys can be mailed, faxed, or distributed to respondents through trade publications or events. This means that a broad and representative sample of certain populations can be easily reached with this platform. Since these questionnaires are completed at the respondent’s convenience, participants have an opportunity to verify records and otherwise consider answers more carefully.

However, response rates and data quality for paper surveys tend to be lower than those of Web- and telephone-based studies. Results depend on the respondent’s written communication skills and willingness to answer every question.

In summary, sound data collection depends on gaining access to the right people and motivating them to provide you the information you need. Choosing the best platform for your study depends on a combination of the following factors related to your project:

• Timeline:
  Internet surveys are generally faster than phone interviews. Paper surveys tend to be the slowest to field.