People Aren't Robots: A practical guide to the psychology and technique of questionnaire design

Newly revised in 2024! The 5th edition now includes how to leverage artificial intelligence in your survey design process and how to create fun and playful question styles.

Why this survey book:

👉 “People aren’t Robots” gets to the point right away. Learn what you need to know to build better surveys now with specific instructions, examples, and only the theory you need to know.
👉 Learn how to gather great quality data even though people who answer surveys are fallible and imperfect, not robots.
👉 Learn specific tactics to generate better response rates, completion rates, and data quality resulting in better quality business decisions from your survey data.
👉 Learn how to write fun and engaging questionnaires that people want to finish and look forward to answering again.
👉 Convenient size to tuck in your pocket or purse, and learn on-the-go on the plane, train, or metro.
👉 Includes a forward by Pravin Shekar, the Outlier Marketer and Former Interim CEO of ESOMAR

Who will benefit:

🛒 Marketers, brand managers, and advertising executives who need to write surveys that will help them deeply understand retail, customer, consumer, and shopper behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and opinions.
📚 Community, social, academic, and experienced researchers in government, economics, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, communications, and more.
👩🏾 Founders, entrepreneurs, and start-up leaders who need surveys that will accurately identify white spaces, untapped markets, and innovation niches.
🐵 DIY and self-directed researchers who want to create higher quality surveys using tools like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Jotform, and Google Forms
🎓 People who have minimal or no experience with research but need to write surveys that will answer key questions.

Questionnaire design topics include:

• Basic survey principles and guidelines
• Respectful and inclusive language so people will want to finish your survey
• Using artificial intelligence to generate better questions and answers
• Creating fun and engaging questions that people enjoy answering
• Target audience screener questions so you won't pay for completes you can't use
• Data quality questions, e.g., red herrings, straightlining, satisficing,
• Common question design problems, e.g., question length, opt-outs, bias
• Quantitative questions, e.g., closed-ends, single-selects, multi-selects, grids, scales, ranks, ratings, sums
• Qualitative questions, e.g., open-ends, verbatims
• Sensitive questions, e.g., income, ethnicity, disabilities, unethical, illegal activities
• Demographic questions, e.g., age, region, education, and employment

Annie Pettit, PhD, is a Fellow of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the Canadian body for market research. She received a PhD in experimental psychology after completing her dissertation on the data quality of offline and online surveys. Dr. Pettit has more than fifteen years of experience writing, analyzing, advising, and teaching questionnaire design in the professional world of marketing research. She writes for professional journals and industry associations, and has been an invited speaker at many industry conferences. Dr. Pettit has won a 2016 Ginny Valentine Award, 2014 ESOMAR Excellence Award for Best Paper, 2014 MRIA Award of Outstanding Merit, 2013 ESOMAR award for Best Methodological Paper, and the 2011 David K. Hardin Award. Her first book published in 2011, The Listen Lady, is a novel about social media research.