subject: Selecting The Appropriate Target Audience For Your Online Questionnaire [print this page] One of the hardest things about using an online questionnaire, or any questionnaire for that matter, is ensuring you have the right target audience. Sociology students and statisticians concern themselves with this on a daily basis. There are a few rules to follow to make sure the results you obtain through the online questionnaire are actually valid and useful, which starts by understanding what you intend to monitor.
Understanding Your Own Online Questionnaire
In a very simply example, if you want to measure the response men have to a certain sports car, there is no need to send out a questionnaire to women. In a more complicated example, if you want to know what the higher echelons of an organisation think about certain processes, you may want to consider sending out an online questionnaire only to senior management teams, or perhaps also to their Personal Assistants.
Valid Statistics
Conclusion validity, as it is known in the statistical world, is a very important part of running online questionnaires. The target audience is incredibly important in this, meaning you need to ask the right people. Besides this, you also need to ask the right number of people. The simplest part of conclusion validity, and technically the only part you should concern yourself with, is that if you have a highly targeted audience, statistics are only valid if you reach over 25% of the potential candidates. So, in an organization of 100 people, at least 25 have to answer the questionnaire in order for the results to be valid. It is important to bare this in mind when choosing your target audience, since lower than 25% response rates will demonstrate nothing other than chance responses. This further underlines the importance of adequately promoting and sharing online surveys.
Understanding Demographics
Having a basic understanding of demographics is also of vital importance when designing an online questionnaire for the right target audience. You must understand how many women you require and how many men, what sort of ethnic backgrounds you are looking for and what kinds of age brackets. If appropriate, you may also want to consider their sexual orientation, religious beliefs and political orientation. The more variables you add, the more in depth the results will be and the more they will demonstrate the differences between specific groups. If your online questionnaire is within an organisation, such things as job role, level of seniority, years of service and annual income may also be important. If you are performing a global questionnaire, you may want to think about such things as geographical location and country of origin. Do make sure you include these as questions in your questionnaire, perhaps on either the first or last page, where you ask more personal details. A pointer for that is to always allow people the option of answering the questionnaire anonymously and to give them to option of prefer not to answer. Although this will slightly skew your statistics, it will greatly increase your response rates. These sorts of questions will also ensure you can check that you havent gone outside of your target audience.
by: Peter Andrews
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