Information by Design
Lifestyle Survey Toolkit

Piloting the Questionnaire

Before any questionnaire goes ‘live’ in terms of data collection it should go through a testing and pilot phase.

Testing – this is best done by trialling the questionnaire yourself, or with colleagues – and is best done at an early stage

Piloting – when the final draft of the questionnaire has been tested and you have worked through the checklist of pitfalls then it is best to pilot the question.

A pilot survey is;

• A small-scale version of the full survey
• Useful for checking questionnaire content, ease of completion, item non-response
• Also for estimating non-response, sample sizes required, logistics such as timings of study