Improving Trust in Surveys by Focusing on the Respondent User Experience

Improving Trust in Surveys by Focusing on the Respondent User Experience

Kevin Collins, Survey 160

Many discussions of “trust in polling” focus on the perspective of consumers of polls: do people trust polls when they read top lines and crosstabs. But this is not the aspect of trust over which researchers have the most control. Rather, we should start by prioritizing trust among participants in survey research by focusing on improving the respondent user experience.

Researchers ask respondents for three things: their private information (whether biographical information or viewpoints), their time, and in online surveys, their willingness to click on hyperlinks they may not recognize. Respondents must trust researchers enough to provide these things, and to earn that trust, as researchers we should minimize what they ask, and be honest about it. READ MORE