Authoring Surveys: Guidance for Societies, Publishers, and Publishing Professionals

Survey methodology is a vast and complex discipline, one that often requires years of research practice and advanced academic credentials (don't worry, you don't need a PhD to understand this primer!). Surveys are created and deployed by researchers, market research teams, government entities, and organizations to understand the behaviors, opinions, and attitudes within and across different populations. Surveys are also a popular method; a recent Google search for "creating a survey" yielded more than one billion results. This primer offers advice on survey best practices, with a specific focus on the beginnings of the survey creation process—from choosing a survey tool and writing survey questions, to articulating the purpose of a survey and accessibility considerations. These best practices will provide a foundation to help you collect reliable, quality data to understand your target audiences more deeply. Please note: This primer does not claim to be an all-encompassing source of survey knowledge; it is an introduction to 6 considerations when creating surveys. 1. Think Like a Respondent One way to approach creating a survey requires thinking like a survey respondent. Dillman et al.1 describe this approach as the respondent state of mind, which is meant to push the survey creator to think through the objectives, questions, language, response options, and other survey aspects from the perspective of a respondent. The authors provide several questions to consider when doing this, such as, "What will the respondent here or see first?", "Will [they] be able to understand the questions?", and "How will [they] […]