Common types of survey bias (and how to prevent them)
Bias is inherent. Discover how four common types of survey bias can affect your research, and learn how to prevent them in your next study.
Administering preliminary market research using surveys can save businesses time and resources. However, accurate feedback and insights depend on the surveyor asking unbiased questions that get honest answers.
While it may seem impossible to avoid biased survey questions, there are ways to order your questions to prevent answer bias. You can also strategically plan to use certain question types to help ensure you’re not adding your own bias to the survey design.
When conducting research, whether gathering data for a political poll or feedback on a new product idea, honest feedback will provide the most accurate data.
This article will teach you the different types of survey bias and how to reduce bias in a survey.
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What is survey bias?
Survey bias is a deviation of feedback based on certain influences by the surveyor and respondent. Sampling bias certainly plays a part in how unbiased feedback and insights can be.
How can survey bias influence research and results?
Survey biases can negatively affect research results due to limited data and inaccurate analyses. Such inaccuracies are the result of responsive and unresponsive biases. More specifically, the errors in survey results impact data issues, poor strategies and investments, low ROI, dissatisfaction, and inconclusive results. Understand how a little bias can cause big issues.
- Data issues: Data issues will come from less-than-truthful responses and non-response biases. Either one of these issues can cripple you towards achieving a clear and conclusive analysis.
- Poor strategies and investment: Deciding the number of participants in a survey sample to match the larger audience is critical for collecting valuable feedback. Strategic planning is necessary to carry out your business objectives.
- Low return on investment (ROI): The time and costs of building a market research survey must be worth the effort. Making business decisions based on imperfect feedback and insights will ultimately result in a low monetary return on your investment.
- Dissatisfaction: Unsatisfactory survey results can lead to poor business decisions that can snowball into low performance. Low performance might result in unsatisfied investors reducing their contribution and your marketing budget.
- Inconclusive results: Ambiguous survey results might require a repeated test, which will take more time and cost. Also, new sampling may overlap with respondents from the first survey who may refuse to participate in a second one.
Types of survey bias
Sampling bias
Sampling bias occurs when certain people are systematically more likely to be chosen in a sample than others, and this is also known as purposive sampling.
Purposive sampling has its advantages in certain situations, particularly for smaller groups. Yet, when it comes to sampling a larger population, reducing the amount of bias in your surveys is critical for the most accurate insights.
Related reading: Learn about 4 leading types of bias and how to prevent them from impacting your next survey results.
Response bias
Response bias is skewed insights from respondents whose answers deviate from their feelings. The response can be a result of many factors.
Speeding through surveys to finish them quickly may result in biased answers. For example, a user may only complete the multiple-choice answers and not the text responses.
Other biases found in responses may result from respondents not disclosing demographic information in a survey. They might not understand the question, or they’re just not comfortable answering. It’s possible that through hasty purposive sampling, the survey might not be relevant to respondents. It could also be the survey structure that encourages a particular answer.
Overall, there are essentially seven types of response bias:
- Demand: Demand reflects the respondents’ pressure to take a survey. As a result, their behavior and opinions change based on their advanced knowledge and assumptions about the questionnaire.
- Social desirability bias: Social desirability reflects respondents’ desire to answer a question in a way they believe is morally or socially acceptable. It’s a type of conformity bias.
- Dissent bias: Dissent bias is when respondents answer survey questions negatively. They may not understand what the survey is for, or they might have difficulty understanding the questions.
- Acquiescence bias: Acquiescence bias means all survey answers are positive. This feedback might be the result of administering a survey too soon. The consumer should have enough time to properly assess the product or service.
- Extreme response bias: Extreme biases are seen in answer selections like “Strongly agree” or “Strongly disagree.” Here, respondents choose extreme answers even if it’s not their actual viewpoint.
- Neutral responding: Neutral responding is the opposite of extreme bias. Respondents consistently choose an unbiased answer. This type of response bias reflects disinterest from the respondent.
- Question order bias: Question order bias reflects the order in which the questions are asked. This arrangement can negatively or positively affect the respondent's answer, so the order of survey questions must be wisely structured.
Related reading: Eliminate question order bias to improve your survey data.