Extra Support: Avoiding Double-Barreled Questions

In market research, it’s important to get the clearest, most truthful answers you can from respondents in your interviews and quantitative surveys. This is a tall order as it is, but it grows even taller when you consider some of the showing that 80% of customers abandon a survey halfway through and 66% of customers would rather reach out to a brand on their own to give feedback. Given this, it’s critical to make sure you’re not wasting your respondents’ good nature and their time—as well as your own.

But if the questions aren’t crafted well to begin with, you can inadvertently mislead respondents or corner them into answers they don’t know how to give. When this happens, you end up with skewed or inaccurate results. You also get potentially irritated respondents who didn’t fully understand how they were supposed to answer and aren’t confident in the feedback they gave.

It’s hard to make good business decisions with bad data. And since many marketing and consumer insights teams are often strapped for resources, it’s challenging to re-run the same survey if the first one didn’t yield what you needed. All of which is to say that how you write your survey questions matters more than you may realize.

Here’s a closer look at a common dilemma when writing online survey questions.

When two isn’t better than one

Double-barreled questions are an all-too-familiar trap in which you ask the respondent to address more than one point or issue at a time. For example:

What is this product? How is it different from other products on the shelf?

When posed this way, the respondent is really being asked to consider two separate—even if related—points. The problem is that in many cases a respondent will only address the first question, which then forces the moderator to follow up with the second question again. But maybe the respondent deliberately chose not to answer one of the questions, or thought the answer they gave properly encompassed both.

There’s also this example:

How satisfied are you with the quality and price of the product?

In this case, it’s next to impossible to know how much consideration the respondent actually gave to both “quality” and “price” when they answered. You could wind up with a lot of answers that gave more consideration to quality, or more consideration to price, but not necessarily to both equally.

And another one:

Does this remind you of any other brand of products? If yes, what?

Asking a closed-ended question and immediately following it up with an open-ended question might seem like a good way to get complete information from a respondent, but here again, people are likely to answer the easiest or most direct part of the exchange and not give additional explanation. And if you have to ask for the explanation, it can add more time to the entire process that you may not have planned for.

A better way to ask survey questions

To avoid double-barreled questions, make sure to break up your questions into individual points. The first and second examples above are easy ones to fix. You can ask the first two questions individually—“What is this product?” and “How is it different from other products on the shelf?”—and turn the second example into “How satisfied are you with the quality of the product?” and “How satisfied are you with the price of the product?”

For the third example above, the same instruction applies: ask the initial question on its own, then follow up with the open-end. In fact, it’s helpful to build in two to three minutes for probing and organic follow-up for some of your key questions. Asking “why,” for example, is a particularly useful way to draw out more detailed and nuanced responses, which in turn gives more depth to the overall insights you gain.

But make sure you’re not slipping into qualitative research if your intent is to gather quantitative information. If much of your survey is composed of qualitative open-ends but your real goal is to get definitive, quantifiable answers to “how much,” “when,” and “how often,” then it’s important to take a step back and make sure you’re staying in the right lane.

Double-barreled questions aren’t the only survey faux pas that’s easy to commit. Loaded questions, ambiguous multiple-choice questions, and questions that are far too vague, to name a few, can creep into the survey-writing process despite best intentions. Having a guide for writing questions will help you stay on track. And in general, it’s good to be aware of all the potential pitfalls—not just in crafting questions but also in recruiting respondents, running the survey itself, and handling the results—so you can avoid bad data and position your teams and company to make better decisions.