Why Response Bias is Your Survey’s Biggest Enemy

When evaluating employee satisfaction rates within your organization or when uncovering important information about your target audience, surveys are the go-to methodology. However, it can be frustrating and de-motivating to receive a limited number of responses from your respondents.

To obtain real data, you need to design an error-free and bias-free survey. Response bias is one of the main reasons for obtaining inconsistent data. To learn more about response bias, read-on!

When a participant diverges from truthful survey question responses intentionally or unintentionally, response bias occurs. Before you release and disseminate your survey, you should make sure that you lessen the response bias potential in your surveys.

Here’s a list of five items that can help you to fight against the biases within your survey.

Understand Your Target Audience

If you want to create a comprehensive survey, you need to understand your target audience. Tailor the survey according to the needs of your audience. If you send your survey to a non-ideal audience, you won’t get the answers you are seeking.

When you want your survey to be bias-free, carefully choose your words by keeping in mind the audience. This way, you know you will be able to get consistent responses. But, how do you determine your target audience? Start by identifying what you need from your respondents with respect to such factors as gender, age, education qualification, and occupation. Include questions to filter out who you are (and are not) seeking as an ideal respondent.

It is obviously pointless to send a survey to a respondent who is unfamiliar with your products or services. There are chances that the respondent will either leave the survey in between or respond randomly which will degrade the data quality.

Outline Survey Questions

After getting insight into your target demographic, work on constructing questions. What can lead to response bias? Leading your respondents to respond in favor of any answer can cause your respondents to be unknowingly biased. When creating questions for the survey, don’t include any emotionally-charged or polarizing questions.

Provide a thorough answer list

You need to put effort into creating unbiased questions, and you need to put the same amount of effort into creating the answer choices. Provide an essential list of possible answer options for the questions.

Closely related multiple answer options can be the reason for response bias. If you want to avoid bias, give a way out answer options to your respondents. Good opt-outs are ‘Don’t know,’ ‘Unsure’, and ‘Neutral’. This way, the respondent doesn’t have to skip the question all together or enter in a random answer.

Balance the text and design of the survey

If you want to conduct an online survey, it is important to maintain the balance between the text and visuals. Try to remove the out-of-proportion page elements or images from the survey.

Respondents usually prefer to respond to the to-the-point surveys, often using their mobile phones. This means that the design of the survey should be ideal for all the devices, including desktops, smartphones, tablets and more. The easier it is to interact with the survey, the less likely that the respondent will desert the survey. You will be able to avoid some of the bias that occurs due to incomplete data collection.

So, now you have a list of practices to keep in mind while building and launching your next survey.

If you think that anything should be added to this list of practices to avoid response bias and improve the quality of your surveys, drop us a line in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Marcus From the field of online survey and research firm, I am working at Ambivista and writing a lot of informative stuff since long. Website: https://www.ambivista.com