Cognitive load reduction strategies in questionnaire design

Kylie Brosnan, Bettina Grün, and Sara Dolnicar

Survey data quality suffers when respondents have difficulty completing complex tasks in questionnaires.

Introduction

Answering survey questions diligently requires cognitive effort. Respondents need to read instructions and understand them, read survey questions and understand them, read answer options and understand them, search their memory to find information relevant to answering the question, organize the information to formulate their response, and then check whether the response answers the question. The quality of a respondent's answer depends on the effort they are willing to invest and the difficulty of the task, which is the "sum of the cognitive demands imposed by the requirements for information retrieval and processing and the affective demands imposed by the...

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