Bad Web Survey Question of the Day

This morning I was asked to do a survey on backups by a friend of a friend who is doing an MBA project.  An interesting topic and one that is close to my heart as a small business owner who has had two issues in the past four years that I only survived because I run regular backups.

One of the basic principals of building Web survey questions is that the options for answering have to cover ALL POSSIBLE responses – not just the responses you think are most likely. 

So with that background, here’s the bad survey question of the day:

Q:  How long can you survive without the data and applications on your computer?

• A few hours
• A day
• A few days
• More than a few days
• Forever

My answer to this question is:  I CAN’T SURVIVE!!! 

Seriously, in my business I need my data and applications every moment.  But I didn’t have an option to present that opinion, and I probably answered all the other questions in a different way because this is so critical to me – which the surveyers won’t be able to segment.

This question could have been easily fixed by asking “How else could someone answer this question?”  With the one exception that I had, it’s a pretty complete list.  So maybe they could have realised they were missing my answer if they had just taken a moment to think about completeness. 

In general, adding an “Other” category allows you to quickly learn that you have missed something – a great best practice because even the best researcher doesn’t know all the options.