The following is a guest post by Cherryl Pereira, Head of Content at Chisel Labs
Do you know what your customers are thinking?
It’s not easy to figure out, but it is possible.
One way you can do this is by using rating scale or forms that people fill out for you.
If you want to get the most accurate answers from them, then here are some tips to help you craft your rating scale questions strategically.
What are rating scale questions?
What is the importance of rating scale questions?
What are the advantages of rating scale questions?
Examples of rating scale questions
How to strategically craft your rating scale questions?
Conclusion
What are rating scale questions?
Rating scale questions are types of survey questions in which respondents answer by rating the extent to which they agree with one or more statements.
These can be found in surveys, polls, and questionnaires; where you ask people about their agreement on a particular topic.
Some common examples include: “On a scale of 0-100 how likely would you buy this product?”, “How satisfied are you with your experience today?”, “What is the likelihood that you will purchase these products?” and so on.
The below-mentioned points explain what rating scales consist of – One extreme point (often labeled ‘Strongly Disagree’) and another extreme point (often labeled ‘Strongly Agree’). The middle option between the two extremes is often labeled ‘Neither Agree nor Disagree.’
Rating scales are common in marketing and business research.
They can be used to measure satisfaction, willingness to recommend a product or service, the likelihood of repurchasing an item (or not), overall quality of the user experience with a product or website, and so on.
Rating scales can also be explained as: “A scale that provides respondents with sets of statements which represent opposite ends on some continuum and ask them to rate how well each statement represents their opinion about something.”
What is the importance of rating scale questions?
Rating scale questions play a very important role in research studies.
Nearly, all the researchers follow rating scale questions to judge and measure the subjective opinions of people about a particular product or service.
Rating scale questions are important when asking multiple-choice type survey questions where there are more than two options given from which participant has to decide upon one option i.e., selecting one of the described choices. For example: strongly disagree, disagree, agree, and strongly agree.
Rating scale questions are useful in particular scenarios where there is a need for participants to express their opinion about something or give some feedback on a certain topic/issue.
This needs to be measured using effective tools like rating scales with proper instructions given to each participant so that they can provide accurate information as required by the researcher conducting the research study at hand.
What are the advantages of rating scale questions?
Rating scale questions are a good way to understand people about a product or service. It is one of the easiest and most effective ways to collect opinions from customers, clients, and users.
Rating scales can help you measure the performance of your organization in comparison with competitors.
As well as helps organizations improve themselves based on customer needs and wants. This type of research has been used for decades by leading companies around the world such as Google, Apple Inc., and IBM.
Rating scales are very useful for market research and understanding customers’ preferences. Rating scales can be used for various types of questions such as customer satisfaction, brand awareness, brand image, product features like durability or performance, etc.
The rating scale is a very effective tool to gather feedback from people on the internet about your company and its products. It will help you understand what changes you can make to your product or service to increase sales.
Let us look at some of the examples of rating scale questions.
Examples of rating scale questions
The first example would be:
How satisfied are you with our customer service? (Very Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, Neutral, Somewhat Unsatisfied, Very Unsatisfied.)
The second example would be:
What is your favorite color? (Red, Blue Green Yellow)
Another very simple question to ask is how old someone or something is. For example, the age of a giraffe can easily be found on google but to ask it specifically in an interview might not help much depending on what kind of job position they’re applying for.
The following questions will all depend on who’s asking them and why. Some examples could include “what time did you start this morning?”, “how long have you been working here?”
So how do we create effective rating scale questions? Let’s find out in the next section.
How to strategically craft your rating scale questions
The rating scale questions must be strategically crafted. Users may end up providing biased responses if they do not understand your question properly.
In addition, poorly written questions can also impact research results and insights from users or participants of a study. So it becomes necessary that you write carefully chosen words in the questionnaire design process of any research project.
Examples of Poorly Written Questionnaire Design: For example “Is there anything else you would like us to know about this?” This statement indicates an open-ended response with no specific options for feedback. This might cause respondents to provide vague answers instead of giving precise information according to his/her knowledge thus creating bias.
In fact, there are several ways that you can craft a rating scale question to create a more accurate and precise result which is particularly useful in the era of big data where every detail matters for better insights.
A good questionnaire design helps study participants or respondents provide substantial information with their responses without causing any hesitation due to vague wording to gain quality results from them.
Rating scales questions also allow researchers to understand an individual’s thought process behind their opinion on certain topics. Hence, helping them develop strategies accordingly during research projects based on these findings.
In addition, poorly written questions can also impact research results and insights from users or participants of a study. So it becomes necessary that you write carefully chosen words in the questionnaire to get the most out of your study.
To achieve this, you need to ensure that the questions are properly worded to elicit an unambiguous response from respondents and do not cause any confusion or hesitation in them while they provide their answers.
In addition, it is also important for researchers to understand what exactly a respondent wishes to convey with their answer before asking him/her multiple-choice questions about it.
If these things go wrong during research studies then results can be flawed which may lead to wastage of time and resources on part of either party involved.
The company that these rating scale questions must be commissioned the research project or even researchers themselves by causing damage due to incorrect decisions being taken based on faulty information provided by participants via inaccurate feedback. Click here to learn about dealing with negative feedback.
The common mistake of researchers is that they do not understand the exact meaning or context in which respondents are providing their answers.
It may be because the respondent does not know how to express it properly so they try their best with whatever words come to mind first and provide an answer based on this explanation alone.
This can have adverse effects at times as participants fail to provide accurate feedback due to a lack of clarity regarding what exactly they need to convey by answering a particular question put forth by the researcher during research studies being conducted across different fields, say for example – Product testing.
This is where a Rating Scale Question comes into play – in that it provides a clear framework for respondents to base their answers on, which therefore helps the researcher understand and interpret data accurately with greater ease.
This also enhances the credibility of research findings as they better represent participants’ true opinions without having been influenced by ambiguous questions or situations.
Always make sure to choose your Rating Scale Question wisely.
A rating scale question can either be unipolar or bipolar – Unipolar means that all options presented in the given range are of equal distance from each other and therefore, one option cannot be deemed better than another whereas Bipolar means that there is a positive end of an opinion or scale along with negative end.
It is vital to use the right language in your rating scale questions.
Avoid putting words like ‘worst’ or ‘bad’ since these are emotionally charged and tend to influence participants into choosing an extreme response that might not be true at all. Instead, use neutral terms such as “Least Preferred” or “Not Quite.”
Rating scales questions help you in gathering information that can be utilized to analyze and compare the results effectively.
However, it is important that these rating scale questions are unbiased and presented to participants with clear instructions on how they should answer them.
If your business requires a concise analysis for example: “How would you rank our service?” or “How would you compare our product with others in the market?” then rating scale questions are a good option. Rating scales should be clearly defined and formulated to avoid confusion among participants.
The options chosen for the answers should also provide ample space between them so that people can respond without falling into either end of ‘extremely satisfied’ or ‘extremely dissatisfied’.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that rating scale questions are extremely important when conducting any sort of qualitative research study across different fields such as marketing, consumer behavior studies, and so on. since they provide clarity to both respondents and researchers alike while additionally enhancing accuracy levels.
Cherryl Pereira is the Head of Content at Chisel. Chisel Labs is a premiere agile product management software company that brings together roadmapping, team alignment, and customer connection.
Tim Rotolo
Shruti Goli