You design great online surveys with perfect designs and interesting questions. Your customer segments and the market represent well-meaning categories based on your product usage and sales. Your market research team is relentlessly working. But the data you collect still lacks proper insights despite using the best online survey sites in India or abroad.

What could be the reasons?

Leading questions is one we think of. Asking questions that carry their own opinions in your survey is one of the main reasons that fail even the well-researched questionnaires. Let’s walk you through some details on leading questions and how to avoid them.

What are Leading Questions in Online Surveys?

When you ask questions that probe users in a designated direction and hint them to choose an option, such questions are leading questions. For instance, “Do you think women employees need more lucrative positions and better salaries?” would not make your users think. Most respondents concerned with the glass ceiling at work will nod. Or perhaps all of them will, to be in the good books of the company and by not sounding patriarchs.

A leading question, thus, subtly influences respondents to select a biased choice. Such choices skew the study. And ultimately, brands don’t get the right picture of a user’s behavior. A leading question can be intentional or otherwise. Even if a brand is leaning towards one of the many inputs, they shouldn’t reflect so with their choice of words. Otherwise, there’s no point of collecting data externally by investing time and money.

If you want to find whether your audience enjoyed the newly launched flavor of ice cream, you should rather not use the word enjoy in your question. Instead of “how much did you enjoy the new ice cream flavor”, you should rather ask, “Rate the new flavor <name the product> of our ice creams”.

How You Can Avoid Leading Questions in a Surveys

    1. Simplicity and Clarity

As mentioned earlier, it takes away the question's simplicity when you club 2 topics like lucrative positions and better salaries. Never combine multiple questions into one. Your users might have different opinions about salary and position.

Likewise, clarity comes in text with simplicity. Not necessarily everyone can fathom complex questions. With multiple scenarios put together in a question, clarity may not be obvious.

    2. Avoid Assumptions

If you assume something in a question, you’re leading the users in a particular direction. Say you’re surveying the work culture for the women workforce. And posing a question like, “Would you like to obtain a daycare facility on the premise if we start one?”. This question is a barrier to women’s opinions who don’t have kids or who don’t plan to have one shortly. The question also gives an idea that the daycare is still unavailable.

This might also limit the male employees from voicing their opinion in case they never get to answer this question in their survey forms but want to obtain a facility like this.

The best possible way to ask this question is to segregate the survey for people based on kids. Or even better, if you use skip logic. Ask, “Do you need a care facility for kids while you work away from home?” and when the answer is yes, activate a question asking for their desire to have a daycare facility at work premises.

    3. Avoid Jargon or Confusing Formats

Jargons might sound good for intellectuals. But don’t forget your users might not be aware of those terms. Refrain from using terms that are technical in nature, complex to understand, or belong to your company’s dictionary. Think layman. Such precaution is specifically useful for automotive companies, software and hardware products, and brands working in technology.

Also, avoid emoticons. Not everyone is aware of emoticons and their meanings.

    4. Add “Others” Option

You can’t be specific in asking questions all the time. Your question might misguide a particular group of people. In such cases, add “others” to allow users to choose if they can’t relate to the question.

For example, if you ask, “Please rate the new ice cream flavor.” and your user hasn’t tasted it, they will have no right option to select. Hence, offering Excellent, Good, Average, Manageable, and Poor, with “others” is the right thing to do. Offering them a text box to enter their thoughts next to others also helps you get qualitative data.

    5. Comprehensive Testing

Before you release your survey to your segmented users, go through them yourself and check if you see bias in the questions. Read them like a user.

Analyze if a question reflects your own thoughts. For this, scan for words such as “excellent”, “amazing”, “like”, “superlative” and other similar modifiers for your products or services.

If your budget approves, run the survey through someone who isn’t related. Guide them with what you’re looking for. Passing the questions through unrelated people helps remove biases to a great extent.

    6. Balanced Questions

Does your question define the topic in a positive light or negative one? Either way, you need to modify your question. For instance, consider, “Do you think the new abortion law is wrong?” This is a leading question with the word “wrong” used here. Ask, “What do you think about the new abortion law?” instead.

Also, provide balanced choices from positive to negative. This allows users to opt for the one value that might be rare but still changes your data.

Consult Opinionest to Remove Leading Questions

If your respondents feel cheated, misled, or uncomfortable with your questions in a survey, they can drop out midway. And survey abandonment should be the least of your headaches. Hence, try to avoid all possible leading questions in your surveys. Always include “Prefer not to answer” as an option in the questions that might feel like leading.

By using our tips, we hope you can build surveys that get you maximum input from the users. Should you want to work with Opinionest, one of the best online survey sites in India, get in touch with us here.