Asking for Feedback: Innovating Final Comment Questions in Self-Administered Web Surveys

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Web surveys frequently include so-called “final comment questions” (FCQs) to provide respondents the opportunity to express their experiences with the survey in general and its questions in particular. A comprehensive analysis of FCQs to enhance survey and question design is often impeded by high item nonresponse and low answer quality in the form of short and uninterpretable answers. In this article, we therefore investigate what respondent and FCQ characteristics influence the provision and quality of answers to FCQs. For this purpose, we conducted two web survey studies in two German online panels. The first study (N = 874) experimentally varied the visual design of the FCQ (“one multi-line answer box” vs. “ten single-line answer boxes”). The second study (N = 1,001) experimentally varied the answer format of the FCQ (“request for a text answer” vs. “request for a voice answer”). The results reveal that answer provision is influenced by respondent characteristics (e.g. age and survey interest), while answer quality is mostly influenced by FCQ characteristics (e.g. request for a voice answer). Overall, this article provides both survey researchers and practitioners with empirically informed FCQ design recommendations to improve the quality of future web surveys.