THE INFLUENCE OF THE NUMBER OF PAGES OF A WEB QUESTIONNAIRE AND THE VISUAL ORIENTATION OF THE ANSWERING SCALE ON THE SURVEY RESPONSES

Web surveys in which the respondents' answers are collected using a web questionnaire are becoming more and more popular. However, since more and more people are using various formats of screens, smartphones, tablets, etc. for accessing Internet, the possibilities of different views of the questionnaires and flexibility in their design are especially important. On the other hand, the design of the web questionnaire can affect the data collected. Previous studies on the influence of the number of pages of a web questionnaire and the visual orientation of the answering scale on the survey responses provide quite ambiguous and sometimes contradictory results. In addition, there are too few studies that deal with these issues. This article describes a study on the influence of the mentioned features on the survey responses on a sample of 207 students of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka. The aim of this study was to verify whether visual scale orientation and the number of pages influence survey results. In the context of this research the results refer separately to the time needed to fill in the questionnaire and the contents of the answers. A questionnaire which measures positive and negative attitudes toward computers and the Internet was administered to participants. Three versions of web questionnaires were designed: the paging design, the vertical scrolling design and the horizontal scrolling design. Kruskal-Wallis analysis revealed no statistically significant difference in the speed of completing the questionnaire among groups with different designs. Furthermore, analysis of variance did not detect a significant difference in the responses among these groups. We can conclude that the design of the questionnaire in the sense of the number of pages and the visual scale orientation did not affect the survey responses.