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Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(2):349-360; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp031
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Effects of Questionnaire Length on Participation and Indicators of Response Quality in a Web Survey

Mirta Galesic and Michael Bosnjak

Address correspondence to Mirta Galesic; e-mail: galesic{at}mpib-berlin.mpg.de.

This paper investigates how expected and actual questionnaire length affects cooperation rates and a variety of indicators of data quality in web surveys. We hypothesized that the expected length of a web-based questionnaire is negatively related to the initial willingness to participate. Moreover, the serial position of questions was predicted to influence four indicators of data quality. We hypothesized that questions asked later in a web-based questionnaire will, compared to those asked earlier, be associated with (a) shorter response times, (b) higher item-nonresponse rates, (c) shorter answers to open-ended questions, and (d) less variability to items arranged in grids. To test these assumptions, we manipulated the stated length (10, 20, and 30 minutes) and the position of questions in an online questionnaire consisting of randomly ordered blocks of thematically related questions. As expected, the longer the stated length, the fewer respondents started and completed the questionnaire. In addition, answers to questions positioned later in the questionnaire were faster, shorter, and more uniform than answers to questions positioned near the beginning.

MIRTA GALESIC is with the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA, and also with the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany. MICHAEL BOSNJAK is with the School of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Via Sernesi 1, I-39100 Bozen/Bolzano, Italy. We are grateful to Branimir Sverko and Roger Tourangeau, editor Peter Miller, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science (grant 0130406 awarded to Branimir Sverko), the Croatian Unemployment Bureau, and the research agency Puls (Zagreb, Croatia).


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