I often find it’s a challenge to frame questions in the right way: whether surveying online with TypeForm, HotJar or in person interviews.
In cognitive psychology and behavioural economics, much research on framing effects (cf. Kahneman, Tversky) suggests that the wording of a question can greatly influence a responders answers.
Are there any tools to make sure I’m not asking biased or leading questions, or that the questions I’m asking my users are being answered truthfully?
Don’t ask leading questions.
Unfortunately, there’s no tool to use. It’s more of an art form.
Non-leading questions focus on, “what are your feelings/thoughts about…?”
If you know any psychologists or therapists, you could maybe ask them what they think about your questions. My reasoning is that those professions ask questions for a living.
I found this article that may be helpful.
It is true that the wording of a question can greatly influence the respondent’s answers.
There is bias baked into all survey and interview design, you can’t hope to escape it but you can hope to account for it in a way that lets you separate signal from noise. As long as you are onsistent your approach, you’ll learn something from your data - even if it is just “My interview script resulted in too many hypothetical answers!”
For interviews, this is a good primer here and the last time I did an interview series I followed this general approach>
As for surveys, there are lots of cognitive biases to fight there so it just depends on what your survey’s objective is. These were the principles I used in the last survey I constructed:
I do this a lot. Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll often have a paragraph or two at top to ensure I’m giving information consistently to all participants and then just have a checklist below. As the conversation naturally progresses, I just tick things off my list and then when it runs out of steam, I ask questions to get what’s missing. It helps me too because I’m autistic and have a hard time following the flow of a conversation so it helps me focus and keep track of what’s already been discussed. I used to ask the same question twice because I forgot I’d already asked it- super embarrassing!
Oh this is fun! A workshop facilitator once told me that most people cannot stand silence for more than 11-15 seconds without feeling the urge to fill it. You have to wait them out and let them fill it first. I find it really easy because I’m really comfortable with silence (again thanks to my neurodiversity) but I recognise that it can be really hard.
Yes! Like tell me a story…
No future predictions either! Avoid asking things like “what would you do if this was released tomorrow?” I don’t know? Eat a sandwich? 