Why are general demographic questions usually grouped at the end of a questionnaire

Demographic questions are a great way to get a better understanding of the people who answered your survey. They can provide you with a clear breakdown of the characteristics of your survey audience.

When developing a survey, you always want to keep the flow of the survey in mind – are you asking the questions in an order that make sense to the person answering the questions? And the placement of demographic questions in that order is important.

Generally, the demographic questions should be grouped either at the beginning or at the end of the survey. But which one is the best? This is one of those questions that doesn’t necessarily have a right answer, but really depends on how you’re using the demographic questions (more on that below). However, a general guideline is:

Unless you’re using the demographic questions to filter out your survey respondents, demographic questions should go at the end of the survey.

Why?

For most surveys, demographic questions are the easiest ones to answer. Respondents don’t have to think very hard – they (usually!) easily know their age, gender, postal code, etc. They’ve gotten through the harder questions where they’ve had to provide their opinions about things they may not have really thought about that much before. Now it’s all downhill, answering all the easy questions they know about themselves off the top of their head.

Haven’t you had that same sense of “phew, here we go, now we’re in the home stretch” when you’re answering a survey and you get to the demographic questions? It’s almost like a little flag to your brain that you’re almost done!

Also, if your survey respondents get bored or tired of your survey before they get to the end and they quit early, hopefully you’ve at least got the answers to some of your more important questions. By having the demographic questions at the end, even if they skip these, you’ve still got some great data to work with.

Different ways to use demographic questions

Most of the time, you’re asking demographic questions to get a snapshot of the group of people who took the time to answer your survey. By asking demographic questions, you’ll be able to say things like, “the average age of respondent was 35”, or “75% of respondents were female”, or “50% of respondents were single parents”.

Knowing the demographic breakdown of your survey respondents is important because it helps you target your marketing, or any updates to your programs or services. If 75% of your survey respondents were female, then you need to consider the answers that group provided, and make sure your marketing or any updates to your programs/services reflects their needs and suggestions.

However, there are times when you’ll use demographic questions to filter out potential survey respondents. For example, if you’re developing a program that is geared to menopausal women, you’ll likely want women of a certain age group to answer your questions. So, starting off your survey with some demographic questions like age and gender can help narrow down your survey group right from the start, and filter out any people who don’t meet the profile of the respondent you’re looking for.

Which demographic questions to ask

The challenge with asking too many demographic questions is that they can add considerable length to your survey. So make sure you focus on the questions that you’re going to actually use. The top demographic questions tend to be:

• Age
• Gender
• Income level
• Highest level of education
• Geographic location (like postal code or city)
• Race or cultural background
• Language(s) spoken
• Marital status

This is definitely not a complete list, but just the demographic questions that are asked most often. You can add in different questions based on your specific purpose for doing your survey.

You likely won’t need to ask all these questions. Depending on the purpose of your survey, just focus on the ones that will help you define your survey audience, and help inform your marketing or program/service updates.

Tips for ensuring people answer your demographic questions

Although the demographic questions are usually the lower-risk questions if they’re left blank, you still want to make sure that you get as many responses as possible to all the questions in your survey. A few tips to help ensure people answer these questions include:

1. Be clear about why you’re asking these questions

People are becoming more aware and cautious about providing their data, and even if your survey is anonymous, they might think some of the demographic questions are too personal. Asking someone to provide their household income is a great example – people may not want to answer that, even if they haven’t provided any personally identifying information.

At the beginning of the demographic section, you can add one or two sentences stating that the following questions will be used to develop a snapshot or profile of the people who answered the survey. This will help your survey audience understand how you’re going to use the information, and hopefully feel more at ease providing it.

2. Only ask the questions you need

A guideline for surveys in general is to keep them as short as possible, finding the balance between gathering the information you actually need and are going to use, and asking for as little time as possible from your survey respondents.

This guideline definitely applies to the demographic questions as well. Before you even get to this section, think about what you really need to know about the profile of your survey audience. Age and gender might be enough; or, maybe you do need to know the language they speak at home most often.

Think about how you’re going to use the information collected for each question, then decide if you really need to ask that question or not.

3. Keep the questions short and easy to answer

As mentioned, survey respondents don’t want to think too hard when they’re answering survey questions. Keep the questions you’re asking clear and to the point.

Check boxes are a great idea here – they’re easy for the survey respondent to click through, and they’re also easy to analyze, because you just need to tally up the responses to each.

Conclusion

Demographic questions are a great way to categorize the group of people who took the time to answer your survey. By putting the demographic questions at the end of your survey, you’re helping survey respondents pace their brain power to focus on the targeted questions in the main part of the survey, then coast through the easy to answer questions about themselves at the end of the survey.