A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions and other prompts designed to gather information from respondents. Although questionnaires are often designed to analyze the responses statistically, this is not always the case.
Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of surveys in that they are cheap, do not require as much effort from the questioner as verbal or telephone surveys, and often have standardized answers that make it simple to compile data.
However, such standardized answers may frustrate users. Questionnaires are also sharply limited by the fact that respondents must be able to read the questions and respond to them. Thus, for some demographic groups conducting a survey by questionnaire may not be practical.
As a type of survey, questionnaires also have many of the same problems relating to question construction and wording that exist in other types of opinion polls.
