Northern Illinois University

Office of Research, Evaluation and Policy Studies

Questionnaire

A questionnaire is a self-administered survey. It can be administered in several ways. The most common ways to administer a survey are online or on paper. The type of survey you choose to administer should be based on your audience.

  • Online questionnaires are inexpensive and require little data entry.
  • Paper questionnaires are beneficial because computer programming is not required to format the survey; they can be administered in a group setting; and a hard copy of the surveys is available, which protects against data loss.

The questionnaire response rate is very important to data collection. A low response rate can jeopardize the reliability of your results because the population is not properly sampled.