Essentially, this means you can either show your entire survey on one page, which is called scrolling survey design in the research world.  You can show your survey on multiple pages, i.e., one question per page, which is called paging survey design.  You can alternatively use a hybrid format offered exclusively by LimeSurvey that allows you to show one question group per page consisting of several questions, which we will call categorising survey design. What seems like an easy decision at first will require some further consideration when looking closer at this design topic.  In light of the availability of different technical devices to take surveys on nowadays, such as desktop computers, tablets or smartphones, formats may appear more advantageous on one device, yet more disadvantageous on another device. This adds extra complexity to survey design. Researchers have been testing and evaluating this design question for years now by examining key metrics such as bounce rates, completion times and rates, as well as item nonresponses. Insights indicate that surveys taken on desktop computers do not differ significantly for scrolling and paging designs with regard to completion and bounce rates. Merely, a tendency to skip certain questions was discovered for scrolling survey designs which could have had any number of reasons such as a mental overload, boredom or other problems connected to survey fatigue. Tips For Different Survey Design Formats One thing has to be stated clearly: there is no general best strategy that will apply to any type of survey. Ultimately, it comes down to the survey characteristics with regard to survey length in terms of time and number of questions, as well as technical equipment and connectivity. Nevertheless, scenarios can be created within which a certain design format may be more suitable than others due to the underlying survey conditions. This leads to the following tips for the usage of different survey design formats: In general, if your survey is short in terms of the time it requires to be completed, as well as a low number of questions, the recommendation will always be to use a scrolling design to keep the survey short, regardless of the device used. A paging or categorising design will spread questions over several pages and require respondents to click on the next button as well as to adjust to the subsequent page(s), which prolongs a survey. This will almost always exhaust or lower respondents’ interest potentially resulting in lower completion or higher bounce rates. A paging design usually only makes sense if you have a long survey that is to be taken on either a desktop computer or a laptop, as these devices possess larger screens, as well as allow for faster cursor movements and clicks. This way, surveys can be completed in a more convenient manner when shifting from page to page. Obviously, the aforementioned paging design can also be replaced by a categorising design which is the more elegant way as it groups question subtopics to facilitate respondents recognising logical connections between questions. Because tablet and smartphone devices have smaller touchscreens, a categorising design should be used with long surveys, as it would minimise the negative effects of both pure paging and scrolling designs. In the categorising design, fewer clicks and new page loads are required than with the paging design, as well as less scrolling and information overload are present than with the scrolling design. The advantage of paging and categorising design is perfectly clear: every time a respondent completes one or a few questions on a page and clicks the next button, this data is submitted and saved, even if the respondent drops out on the subsequent page. If a respondent completes the same amount of questions in a scrolling design and drops out without submitting, all that data is lost. In this scenario, paging and categorising designs are more valuable as partial data may still deliver important insights.     ⇨ All in all, we do, however, recommend that you try to avoid creating long surveys with many questions, as these will oftentimes lower completion rates and increase bounce rates due to survey fatigue. Try and split longer surveys by subtopics into multiple shorter surveys. This way, you will make sure to increase survey relevance to your target audience and earn more valuable data to analyse. In the end, it all comes down to how well you know your target audience. The more you find out about devices used and survey perseverance, the better you can suit your survey design to achieve the best results.  

The evolution of surveys has kept up with the development of technology: going from door to door, mailing questionnaires out, calling people to complete phone interviews, using portable computers – and finally online surveys. Online surveys provide some obvious advantages such as reduced paper and administration costs. However, it makes sense to look a bit deeper into the differences between the two general options, online and offline surveys, especially with respect to the quality of the collected data. Quality of data The quality of survey results is made up of the right questions, representativeness of the examined group of interest, and the validity and depth of the answers. Error in your data can occur systematically due to biases, like researcher bias, survey bias, respondent bias and non-response bias, or randomly by misrepresentation. But it’s not just the accuracy of the data: Especially when surveying feedback on customers or an event experience or gathering new ideas and suggestions for improvement, the quality of free text fields are crucial for usable data. All those aspects are notably influenced by your choice of survey format. Response time and rates Online surveys most certainly produce quicker responses, since you can share the link to your survey immediately after creating it without having to call people, mail it to them or meet them in person. Offline surveys, on the other hand, usually produce higher response rates with in-person surveys being the most effective, followed by mail surveys. Online and email surveys still have a better response rate than telephone surveys. The height of response rates doesn’t necessarily translate to representation: If you want to represent the whole population of one country, you’ll need a much lower response rate than when you wish for feedback from a defined group. In a smaller group, you’ll get much smaller sample sizes and it’s much more likely to miss neutral responses and get more positive and negative results. Target group selection Most of the time, the lower response rates of online surveys can be compensated by being able to reach more people – even worldwide if you wish. With the right software you can run a survey in multiple languages of which the participants can select. If the survey has a specific target group or needs a certain frequency distribution in order to be representative, quota setting is a solution that can be used in survey software. A downside to online surveys is that random sampling is more difficult, since generating random email addresses like with phone numbers is not possible. That is not a problem if the group of interest consists of the members of a club, the students of a certain university, or registered customers to a shop. Otherwise panel companies can offer a solution to getting the wished sample size. The benefits of offline interviews include going to specific places after an event to reach specific people and also reaching the computer-illiterate population. Though the “online population” used to have special characteristics like being younger, better educated and more tech-savvy, the computer literacy has drastically increased in the last 15 years. Online surveys are thus reaching more and more people, whereas phone surveys, being still a popular medium of choice, are reaching less and less people, since households that have no landline are increasing, in particular with younger people. (Perceived) anonymity Especially upon addressing sensitive topics like smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, cheating on taxes or gambling, self-protective answering can be observed. This means the participant is not answering honestly, downplays or exaggerates his or her answer. It occurs especially with an interviewer present and even depends on factors like age, gender and ethnicity. But also when asking less sensitive questions, and instead about the experience with a product or event, the results might be biased by the presence of the interviewer in in-person interviews, since people may be more polite and less honest. This also applies to situations with an existing relationship of dependence, as often observed at universities, where the professor to be rated is present at the evaluation. Oftentimes people mistrust online surveys, when they are unsure of their data safety. Particularly if you want to prevent multiple participation, you either have to select setting cookies, saving the IP address or only allow access with a personalized token. All those options might prevent the participants from answering upfront or from answering at all, if you neglect assuring the participants of their anonymity and also choosing a software tool that allows anonymization as needed. This not only concerns the data accessible to the survey creators but also to the software provider. This is why the hosting and data storage should be at best on servers within countries with high data protection legislation like Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain.   Other technical advantages Although the readability of black ink on white paper goes unchallenged, online surveys still win the victory in the design category. By not being restricted in space, it is not only possible to create a more appealing appearance with more coloring and implementation of pictures and videos, but also to provide unlimited space for free text entries. To keep participants interested, online surveys allow many options for personalization, including branching to only show relevant questions, piping to reuse answers or defining different end URLs. Though readability might be better in paper surveys, online surveys grant access to people with disabilities such as poor eyesight by being compatible with screen readers. On the researcher’s side deciphering handwriting is being skipped and less errors in data entry occur with online surveys. Interaction A special benefit of personal interviews arises when you want feedback to an event taking place or to ask for customer feedback immediately after the experience: Since the experience (and the excitement at best) is still fresh in their mind, the motivation to fill in a questionnaire might be higher, particularly in regards to open text fields. The interviewer bias, that has already been mentioned, can be utilized in a good way: From my own experience, a face to face interaction can be beneficial when you are looking for answers in form of free text fields. I learned that people often do not think of their opinion or thoughts as relevant, and so they’d rather skip a question than entering something they deem wrong. In personal interviews you can encourage those to share their experiences. If required, you can give further explanations or ask further questions when fitting. Although offline surveys immediately after the examined experience make a lot of sense, online surveys are still superior when it comes to time management. People are often reluctant to answering at all or fill out their questionnaire as quickly as possible if they feel pressured. Did you know? When creating questionnaires with LimeSurvey, you can have respondents take your questionnaire offline with no need for internet availability. The free Android app OfflineSurveys enables caching any LimeSurvey survey and collecting your data offline. Once the Internet is available again, the app can automatically synchronise the collected responses with your LimeSurvey system. Feel free to check it out here. Conclusion The question whether to choose an online or offline survey cannot be answered conclusively – and it does not need to be. The choice has to be made based on the particular cause depending on the survey goal and type, employee or customer feedback, academic research or feedback to an event. In many cases a combination of both might make the most sense, because that way you can also combine the benefits of both: broadly speaking, the quantity of online surveys with the quality of paper surveys and the combined accessibility of different target groups. LimeSurvey provides a convenient way to combine both: questionnaires that have been created online can be easily converted into a word document or a PDF file. The question display is thereby adjusted in order to be used in a written or personal interview. Afterwards the collected data can be entered manually into LimeSurvey, so that in the end both data sets can be analyzed collectively. All aforementioned features like multiple languages, data security, choosing the degree of anonymity and personalization of the survey design are also provided by LimeSurvey.

The enormous effort and time this consumed made it very difficult for conducting quantitative research. Potential respondents had to be researched, approached, questioned and subsequently data had to be processed and evaluated by hand to derive proper results. Response rates during these early times of survey research were astonishingly high and could often reach 90% or higher levels. This was due to the huge effort of the process which resulted in only very few surveys being conducted at all. The next stage of survey-taking from approximately the 1960s until the 1990s included questionnaires via telephone, i.e. cold-calling potential respondents that were verbally asked a list of survey questions. The present of surveys From the 1990s until today, face-to-face interviews declined due to difficulties in contacting and interviewing target audiences for personal questioning, but also the number of telephone surveys decreased due to the prevalence of mobile phones. However, technological advancements in the shape of new communication channels running via the internet and an increasing network of users online lead to a shift in survey research. Web-based surveys became the prominent way to collect research data from questioning people as they were contactable at any time and any location in large quantities. As a result, adjustments had to be introduced that would change population construction, survey sampling, survey design, statistical evaluations as well as technological expertise in mastering new tools for data acquisition. Due to lower costs per respondent acquisition since the arrival of the internet, people have been overloaded with the quantity and exposure of online surveys, thus leading to strong response rate drops. Consequently, more money has been necessary to recruit samples large enough to meet survey specifications. Strangely, making contact with prospective respondents is harder nowadays than it used to be in past times despite the technological possibilities. No technology at its current status quo can automatically persuade people to participate in surveys, especially when the aforementioned overload puts people in an emotional state of aversion towards survey invitations. Nevertheless, due to the availability of vast personal data and survey panel providers, targeting the most suitable potential respondents for a representative population sample as well as voluntary and beneficial survey participation options have only become possible due to the intelligence of technological innovations. The interplay and long-term consequences of the negative and positive factors attributed to modern-day survey research methods and approaches cannot be conclusively forecasted at this point in time. What is safe to say though is that technology will keep advancing in the future and with it the tools and possibilities to conduct survey-based research. The future of surveys The question remains what the future of survey research will look like. This question affects several factors or entities involved with survey research. What will future survey tools and methods look like? What will future peoples' attitudes or general emotions toward surveys be like? How will future survey creators deal with possibly tremendous shifts in their professional fields? We have put together some theories on how survey research may change and affect these aspects in question. Issues concerning high respondent survey fatigue and low response rates will most likely prevail within the future, especially due to digital communication opportunities that tempt many people or organisations to get their surveys out there. → This will potentially require an even stronger incentivisation or compensation of surveys for respondents to overcome inhibitions or aversions. Interactive surveys might become a predominant form of conducting surveys, thereby enabling respondents to chat with survey creators. → This might increase the attractiveness of general survey experiences due to a proper dialog, a kind of hybrid of old and new methods, i.e. bringing the old-school face-to-face interview format into a digital survey context. Open text questions will be increasingly easy to analyse for artificial intelligence (AI) tools and therefore deployed more often without concerns about the evaluation. → This might benefit survey creators in a manner that it offers more flexibility and appreciation for respondents who may then respond in their own words instead of being forced into a certain response grid. The current trend toward the dominance of mobile survey-taking will likely persist and grow. → Depending on the technological direction we are going to take with regard to portable smartphone computers, responsive web technologies will remain most important also for survey tools; furthermore humans' attention spans within digital environments will continue to converge to zero. A potential alternative approach with respect to technological advancements could be surveys conducted via augmented or virtual reality experiments, i.e. putting people into a digital environmental context or a real-life-digital-hybrid context where real-life interviews or surveys are simulated which ultimately might augment the entire survey-taking experience. There is a reasonable possibility that a replacement of human respondents by intelligent machines might take place when conducting surveys to avoid the central issue of survey fatigue. → Machines with sufficient learning progress may hence represent opinions of a human population which would render human respondents obsolete. Looking even farther into the future with an even more speculative theory, the possibility of humans and machines fusing to create cyborgs of sorts may alter survey research as we know it. This could potentially someday enable survey creators to download contents including opinions and feedback from respondents' brains which will render the actual process of taking surveys obsolete. Admittedly though, this is rather far-fetched at this moment in time. Nevertheless, just like any other area of our everyday lives, survey research will continue to be subject to intense paradigmatic shifts in the future which might bring a new sense of excitement to this field again.