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The start of the questionnaire presents you with the first choice: begin with complex questions, which can filter out less serious participants, or with engaging questions, which may keep people involved for longer? Your decision can affect the response rate and abandonment. Read on to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, our recommendation and other points to consider.
Your options: complex versus engaging questions
At the start of the questionnaire, on the first pages of the survey, there are two possible approaches. Researchers are divided on this too:
Option 1: Start with simple, interesting questions, as participants are demonstrably more likely to abandon a survey near the beginning. The advantage: statistics show that people who do not abandon the survey on the first two pages have an over 80% chance of staying until the end.
Option 2: Start with complex questions and demographic data. This approach, based on the High Hurdle Technique, assumes that less motivated participants are discouraged at the outset, reducing the abandonment rate later in the questionnaire. It applies only to abandonment during the later course of the survey.
Our recommendation: start with simple questions
The right approach often depends on the circumstances. The best option for your questionnaire also depends on other factors, such as participants’ level of involvement, incentives such as a prize draw at the end, and the target group. Employee surveys generally have lower abandonment rates than customer surveys.
As a general rule, we recommend the first approach: start with simple questions that are easy to answer. This engages and motivates participants from the outset. During the survey, LamaPoll’s live abandonment analysis can help you identify problematic pages and, where necessary, optimise questions and text in real time.
What else to consider at the start of the survey
At the beginning, you can use filter questions and skips to send participants down different response paths, for example managers to page 3 and employees to page 4. This requires asking the relevant filter questions, such as department or management role. You can also solve this differently by using participant attributes in LamaPoll’s address book. Participants with the attribute “employee” or “manager” can then be directed straight to the relevant page.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool that lets you design surveys, add pages and create questions. You can also do much more: send participants along individual paths, analyse results automatically, filter data and run multilingual surveys in real time. The settings are designed so that no IT knowledge is required. You can therefore run simple questionnaires as well as complex, dynamic surveys. You can start with blank question structures or use ready-made examples and templates, which you can copy and adapt to suit your needs.
