Top Tips to writing a poll or survey

Be direct.

Vaguely worded survey questions confuse respondents and make your resulting data less useful. It can be helpful to mention a specific situation or behaviour rather than a general tendency, in order to lead to a more specific set of results.

Don’t be leading or biased.

Certain words and phrases can introduce bias into your questions. When you conduct a survey, it’s best to provide only as much wording as a respondent needs, without any of your own opinion included, to give an informed and unbiased answer.

Ensure you’re keeping it short and sweet.

Respondents are less likely to complete long surveys, or surveys that bounce around haphazardly from topic to topic. Although they don’t need to know everything about your research project, it can help to let respondents know why you’re asking about a certain topic.

Start off linear, then go deeper.

After building up the basis of your survey, you can go into more elaborate and in-depth questions. This is especially valuable if you need to cover any potentially sensitive topics in your survey. Never put sensitive questions at the start of the questionnaire where they’re more likely to feel off-putting.

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