I came across an interesting paper that reports the possibility that online questionnaires might, all things being equal, produce slightly longer responses to open-ended questions than their paper-based counterparts.

Martyn Denscombe in his paper ‘The Length of Responses to Open-Ended Question – A Comparison of Online and Paper Questionnaires in Terms of a Mode Effect‘ (2007) investigates whether or not there is any difference between the responses of open ended questions to paper based surveys compared to online surveys.

Denscombe undertook an experiment survey was conducted that involved the random allocation of respondents into two groups who then completed a questionnaire either as a web-based online version or in an 2 Social Science Computer Review “optical mark recognition” (OMR) paper format. The research was designed to enable near identical groups to respond to near-identical questionnaires delivered in different modes.

The findings were that the difference in answers between the paper and online surveys was negligible. The average number of words in the answer of the online survey was 13.6 and 13 for the paper based survey. The results indicate then that online surveys provide an equal if not slightly better methodology for capturing data compared to paper based surveys.

While Denscombe does not speculate why this would be the case it is quite possible that people find it easier to type then to write. I know I certainly do, and off course it is far easier to correct an errors as well as check for errors. It seems then if you are considering moving from paper based surveys to online surveys and you were concerned about any impact on the way questions are answered your fears can be put at ease.

As Denscombe concludes ” Indeed, the findings from this research provide some methodological reassurance to those taking advantage of the low cost and high speed associated with online surveys.”