Email Questionnaires

• Can be useful in getting a quick response for short questionnaires with relatively simple questions
• Participant can respond to questionnaire in email, rather than going to an external website
• ​Low cost

Cons

• Unsolicited emails or bulk emails might be automatically labelled as 'spam' or deleted by the recipient
• Formatting questions within the email is often limited, which means many features that might be available to online or paper questionnaires such as tick boxes
• It is harder to ensure anonymity than it is with a web-based questionnaire, although this can be improved by having separate people collating and analysing the data.
• Collected data needs to be collated and processed

Advice

• Make the emails personal to recipients, e.g. by using individual names
• Limit the number of questions so as to improve response rate. Only include key questions.
• Make sure that you address any privacy concerns participants might have, for example assure them that their email addresses will not be passed to third parties

Resource

Examples

• Email Questionnaire: This document is an example of an email questionnaire produced at the University of Wisconsin Extension that was designed for evaluation purposes.

Sources

Taylor-Powell E. (2002) Program Planning Evaluation:  EMAIL QUESTIONNAIRE, University of Wisconsin Extension, Wisconsin. 

Black computer keyboard by Marius Iordache

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