Making research fun

Research is a profession that should be carried out by experts. The biggest threat to quick and cost-efficient research is that the quality is almost always suffering. DVJ wants research to remain good. Even when it is quick and against low cost. For this reason, we regularly share examples of mistakes and best practises in the market. We share our thoughts and possible solutions to improve research. By following these tips, we can make research better. This time the honour belonged to Research Expert Iris Welvaarts.

Filling out questionnaires is something I really like to do. I get to see new methods and gain ideas in how to improve my own questionnaires, both on wording, technical issues and lay-out. This can go in two directions: as a respondent I am very bored by the survey, or I am surprised by the fun elements and I continue filling out the questionnaire.

In order to get as many responses as possible, we need to make it more fun for our respondents to fill out a questionnaire. Therefore, I try to use different techniques and variate with the type of questions.

But another aspect that can make participation in market research more fun is the visual lay-out. I came across a questionnaire that used a lot of images. Images are easy for the respondent to understand and therefore it didn’t cost me a lot of effort to answer a question.

Figure 1

I stayed very engaged when participating in this questionnaire because I was curious what images would follow next, and which ones would represent my situation best. This also resulted in me participating much more often in their questionnaires than those of other companies.

A remark on this question type is that the pictures should be a good representation of the answer option itself – it can’t be a subjective view from the researcher thinking this is a good match. Therefore, images that are used in a survey should be validated. My pledge is that images can best be used for background questions, since they are easier to create and validate. In addition, because these background questions will be answered last, this will leave the respondent with a good feeling after completing the questionnaire.