Editor’s note: Cary Funk is director of the Commonwealth Poll and associate professor in the School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University , Richmond, Va.

Questionnaires and surveys are an important tool in customer satisfaction research. There’s no better way to know what customers are thinking than to ask. The survey (whether conducted in person, on the phone, in writing, or over the Internet) allows market researchers to gather feedback from large numbers of customers and rapidly analyze their responses. There’s one important hitch to the process, though. The feedback you receive on surveys will only be as good or as useful as the questions you have asked.

There are several things you can do to design useful questionnaires, such as being clear about your information goals and making sure your questions match up with those goals. In this article I’ll focus on the more mundane business of exactly how to go about wording the questions.

Regardless of your information goals, producing a well-designed questionnaire requires a clear focus on the customer. As a teacher of survey design to beginning researchers, I can attest that most first attempts at designing questionnaires lose that focus. Even more-experienced survey researchers find it hard to keep the customer front-and-center during the design process.

Every textbook on survey research has a list of dos and don’ts for writing good survey questions. Herb Weisberg and his co-authors Jon Krosnick and Bruce Bowen advise question designers to use clear, unambiguous wording, avoid writing biased questions, avoid double-barreled questions, and avoid using double negatives. Earl Babbie’s textbook on survey research methods recommends the following laundry list for question construction: make items clear; avoid double-barreled questions; ensure the respondent’s competency to answer; ask relevant questions; use short items; avoid negative items; avoid biased items and terms. Floyd Fowler has written a whole book on the topic of designing survey questions.

All this advice really boils down to just one thing: Thou Shalt NOT Offend Thy Respondents.

The many textbook rules converge into this one simple principle. The problem is that following even this single rule is a lot harder than it looks. When designing a survey questionnaire, there are countless opportunities to violate this simple-looking rule. Let’s review the options.

1. Show them you don’t care.

Each question is an opportunity to demonstrate to respondents how little you’ve thought about or care about their answers. For example, consider asking two or three questions at the same time. That way respondents won’t actually be able to answer the question with the categories provided. Or, make it impossible for them to answer your questions in the categories provided because the categories aren’t mutually exclusive or don’t map onto their experience. Extra options are available in self-administered surveys where only the smallest spaces can be provided for open-ended responses. This way, respondents understand that open-ended responses are not actually wanted. If possible, the whole survey can also be in a small font with limited white space so that respondents feel like they have to work hard in order to complete the survey. Speaking of hard work, make the questionnaire as long as possible so respondents are fully aware that their time is freely available to meet your needs.

2. Insult them with words.

The quickest way to offend respondents is to insult them through the language chosen for the questionnaire. Pejorative and emotionally-charged labels are a sure way to turn respondents off. This is why researchers typically use the most widely accepted terms for racial or ethnic groups. Similarly, questions about events or people involved in activities thought to be undesirable make especially easy options for insult; use a pejorative label for an undesirable activity or physical condition and you’ll be sure to insult.

3. Insult their intelligence.

There are a number of ways to make respondents feel stupid. One of the easiest options for self-administered questionnaires is to hide the skip pattern so respondents can’t tell if you realize that the questions being asked don’t apply to them or if you want them to contort their lives to fit into your neat categories. The added benefit here, especially for Internet surveys, is that you may be able to come back to the respondent and ask them to “correct” their work when they don’t answer all the questions. That way you get two chances to make them feel stupid. Another variant is to use vocabulary they don’t know. This makes it clear that more educated respondents are the ones being sought and those who don’t make the grade should go elsewhere. And, just in case you have a respondent bold enough to ask about a term used in a telephone or face-to-face interview, have interviewers reply with “whatever it means to you.” Another way to make respondents feel stupid is to quiz them repeatedly on an obscure topic. By the end of the series, respondents will get the message loud and clear. If you’re not planning to use this as a sugging opportunity (selling under the guise of polling) to push your tutorials on the topic, you might want to balance a research interest in assessing awareness on your obscure topic with the respondents’ need to be reminded how little they know.

4. Make them play the guessing game.

If you’ve failed at all the other options, you can always make respondents play the guessing game in order to complete your questionnaire. The guessing game allows you to frustrate respondents by asking questions they can’t answer. Use vague qualifiers and abstract language as much as possible so that respondents will never really know what you’re after. Use double negatives so that it’s anyone’s guess whether they actually agree or disagree whether smoking should be forbidden in restaurants. Try to ask for specific factual data so obscure that no respondent will be able to recall the information. For example, how many times have you been to see a dentist in your lifetime or, how often have you watched television network news in the last 10 years? The easiest way to make respondents play the guessing game is to ask them about hypothetical situations where no one really knows how they would feel or what they would do in that situation. If a loved one in your family had leukemia, would you want them to use drugs not approved by the Federal Drug Administration in their treatment plan?

All about them

The objective behind all of the dos and don’ts on questionnaire design is to produce a survey that 1) functions so that people can do what you ask them to do and 2) communicates your focus on the customer. It really is “all about them.” The questionnaire needs to demonstrate that focus and an understanding of the customer’s perspective in order to communicate that you care about their experiences and perspectives.

In this age of declining survey cooperation rates, a well-designed questionnaire is more important than ever. The survey design is one of the key ways that market researchers can influence respondent cooperation and foster goodwill for future survey requests.