Time well spent!
Much has been said by me and others lately regarding time. Time is a resource, time is valuable, time slips away and so forth. One of the best uses of our time as consumer and B2B market researchers is to spend the time needed to pre-test our surveys before we launch them out into the world. If surveys are like children, then we certainly would not let them step outside the door without time spent covering the basics.
I recently read a piece by Kathryn Korostoff of Research Rockstar that likened the survey process to a pre-flight checklist. You would be hard pressed to find a pilot who doesn’t take the time to walk around his or her airplane and check the necessary instruments. We should heed this advice and build into our project timelines enough space to pre-test our survey.
Pre-testing (also known as soft launching) involves testing your survey with real respondents under real conditions. Many of us will ask our colleagues to review our surveys before they go live, but this the step is not the same as a pre-test. Our colleagues can check spelling and logic as well as provide feedback on the nature of the questions, yet they are not our respondents. This limits their perspective.
Our pre-test should include a sub-sample of the actual participants we are planning to invite to the party. We should reach them in the manner we intend for the survey be it online, by phone or by mail. We may not receive feedback on all of the surveys we pre-test, but for those we do the feedback can be critical to project success. From an ROI perspective it is less costly to pre-test your survey than it is to go into the field with a flawed instrument which could lead to inaccurate data informing decisions which lead to bad outcomes.
Photo Source: Men With Pencil On Questionnaire by cooldesign courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/