Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

15What Computerized Business Questionnaires and Questionnaire Management Tools Can Offer

Gustav Haraldsen

Division for Methods, Statistics Norway, Oslo/Kongsvinger, Norway

15.1 Introduction

Business questionnaires are like any other questionnaires in that they contain the same elements as any other questionnaire. Hence, common wording tips, visual principles, and question order recommendations apply (see, e.g. Bradburn et al. 2004, Martin et al. 2007, or Dillman et al. 2009). At the same time, business questionnaires are also different in that they ask about the businesses, while social survey questionnaires ask about the survey respondents (Haraldsen 2013a; see Jones et al. 2013, and Snijkers 2016, for an overview of business survey characteristics).

The same kind of duality applies to respondents. Business respondents are human beings who, when at office, read, interpret, and relate to the requests communicated in questionnaires in the same way as in any other survey. The cognitive four‐step process, with comprehension, data retrieval tasks, judgements, and response, still applies (Tourangeau 1984; Tourangeau et al. 2000). But because business respondents do not report about themselves, but inform about business matters, their access to information sources outside themselves becomes more important than what is normally the case in social surveys. In social surveys, we usually try to isolate the respondent from his or her social environment (Foddy 1993; Krosnick and Presser ...