Market Research Interview Questions: Choosing the Right Style

Last week, I wrote a blog post on 6 tips for writing a better market research interview script. This week, I will be providing an overview on how to choose the right question styles for your market research interview questions. This is a very important piece of the market research interview script design process, as it will be a major determinant of the quality and usability of the data your market research interviews produce.

There are many types of questions that can be used in a market research interview to extract different types of information at different levels of specificity from an interviewee. Below is a list of some common market research interview question types used in market research interviews with short descriptions and a short review of the pluses and minuses of each question style:

1. Single-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple choice question that restricts the respondent to a single selection out of a listed group of options. While single-response questions constrain the choices of the respondent, they are much quicker to answer and much easier to analyze.
2. Multi-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple-selection multiple-choice question that allows the respondent to select all answers that apply to them. This question type allows a questioner to extract a significant amount of information from a respondent in a short amount of time that is easily analyzed, due to its restricted selection format. However, this question type can also lead to incomplete responses, as respondents sometimes opt to only select one choice instead of all choices that apply. Validation questions can be added to the script to verify the accuracy of these responses.
3. Fill-in-the Blank Questions: This is a short fill-in-the-blank style question that does not restrict the respondent to a limited selection of answers. This question type allows you to collect detailed responses, but is very difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
4. Free Response Questions: This is a multi-line, open-ended response question. This question type allows you to extract very detailed answers, but is extremely difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
5. Rank Order Questions: This question type allows the respondent to rank a selected number of items or images based on preference. The responses to these questions are generally restricted to a list of numeric selections that are drag-and-dropped, pull-down-selected or restricted write-in. These questions are difficult to moderate over the phone, but can be very effective in determining relative preferences.
6. Single-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format can be used for dichotomous responses (Yes/No or True/False), multiple-choice questions or likert scale questions that measure level of agreement with a statement (Strongly Agree, Agree, Indifferent, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). Matrix questions can lead to a tendency among respondents called straight-lining, where an interviewee chooses the same or nearly the same response for every item, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect his/her thoughts. The reason this happens is because doing so is easier than carefully considering each question. However, the advantage of matrix questions is that it allows an interviewer to cover a whole series of questions quickly and it generates standardized responses that are easy to analyze.
7. Multi-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format works with multi-response multiple choice questions. This can be very useful on a phone interview when you do not want to have to read the selection categories for every question. This works very well when asking questions about competitors or marketing mediums that have matching responses across a series of different questions. This style of question suffers from the straight-lining tendency. Similarly, this question style can also lead to selective response memory where the responder only remembers the first or last response options offered. These questions often require validation questions to ensure accurate data, especially for important questions.

Effectively designing your market research interview questions will save you and your research team a ton of time when it comes to analyzing the results of your research because it will eliminate the need to standardize responses.  Thus, you want to limit the number of free response and fill in the blank questions that you incorporate into your market research interview script.

If you are interested in reading more about market research, I recommend reading Faria Rahman’s blog post on determining whether or not a market research interview or a focus group is right for your research project.