Does displaying the number of the question in front of the question on a survey affect completion rates in any way?
E.g.,
- Lorem ipsum?
- Dolor sit amet?
- Consectetur adipiscing elit?
vs.
Lorem ipsum?
Dolor sit amet?
Consectetur adipiscing elit?
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Sign up to join this communityI don't believe adding numbers to the question will affect completion rates.
But I do believe that it is good practice to show a progress bar or some sort of indication of how long or how many questions/pages there are in total.
This will let the user feel like they are making progress.
Some references to consider:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/survey-guidelines/
It is ok to number questions in the demographics question section. For example, you could say - 'Please answer the following 9 demographics question', and number the question.
However, when asking questions related to a construct (e.g., customer experience, satisfaction), which are measured with 3-6 rating questions - the questions should be randomised. Because these questions should be randomized, they should not have a serial number.
This Qualtrics article discusses survey question randomization: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/block-options/question-randomization/
This online article discusses why survey questions should be randomized https://help.alchemer.com/help/randomize-questions
Also, this journal article offers a good example of multiple large surveys with randomized questions (see the web appendix as well for procedural details) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2022.03.003
You could number the first one like- this question is number 1/30. Then number all of them