8 General Considerations for Needs Assessment Questionnaire Design

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of needs assessment questionnaire design specifics, it’s important to lay some foundations. There are overarching fundamentals to designing a great set of questions. We have summarised the key points here: 

• Know what you’re looking for, before you start looking. With any questionnaire, it is important to know your hypothesis before you start asking questions. 

• Keep it short! Especially for children. The quality of responses may drop if you make a survey too long. Otherwise, you may risk people not completing all questions, or not giving accurate answers.

• Keep the personal questions to the end. This is similar to a conversation. You wouldn’t start by asking probing, personal questions. You warm up to more serious topics. 

• Use closed questions. A closed question has a set range of answers to choose from. This makes it far easier to analyse responses when you are sampling a large population. Although open questions can be useful, they are better few-and-far between – for specific problem areas. 
• Avoid loaded questions. You can influence someone’s answers if you aren’t careful about how you word a question. Try to avoid putting your own opinion in a question, as this will invalidate any answers. 
• Keep answers balanced. Similar to the last point; you don’t want to ‘lead’ a child to an answer, or it isn’t valid data. So, offer the same amount of positive answers as negatives.

• Don’t use absolutes. By asking questions with absolutes – for example, ‘never’, ‘always’ or ‘every’ – you will only get polarised responses. Leave room for the respondent to tell you accurate information, don’t trap them in boxes. 
• No double-barreled questions. Don’t try to cut down on your questionnaire length by combining two questions. Asking for feedback on more than one subject at a time is a surefire way to get meaningless responses.