Zoomerang Blog

Bias-Proof Your Online Survey. Randomize It!


Here at Zoomerang, we want you to have the most reliable, trustworthy survey results possible. After all, what’s the point of creating a survey, making it beautiful, and carefully selecting your respondents (or letting our Zoomerang Sample panel do the work for you!) if you can’t trust your results?

Humans are inherently prone to bias, but your survey doesn’t have to be! Here at Zoomerang we offer question and answer rotation, a fast and easy way to minimize the potentially biasing effect of human nature on your online survey.

Your respondents may be biased to choose the first answer in a multiple choice question, for example. By randomizing your answers, different respondents will see different answers first, and the bias will be neutralized. With the click of a button, we allow all of our customers to randomize the order of the answers in any multiple choice, rating scale, or ranking question.

survey answer randomization feature

More recently, we began offering question randomization to our Pro and Premium customers. This allows you to randomize the order that that questions appear on the page, which neutralizes the bias that may result from respondents viewing a certain question first. The feature gives you the option to exclude the first question, the last, or both, while randomizing the rest.

survey question randomization feature

Those features are great for countering the effects of question and response bias in your survey responses. But we still weren’t satisfied, so this week we released our newest, bias-prevention feature— page rotation, also known as concept rotation.

Now our Premium customers have the option to randomize not just answers and questions, but the actual survey pages! You can choose to randomize all your pages, or select the pages you want it to randomize manually.

survey page randomization feature

This feature gives you the flexibility to randomize your survey pages to neutralize the bias created by page order. It’s similar to the randomize answers feature, except it allows you to devote entire pages to one concept.

If you wanted to get people’s opinion on different youtube videos, for example, you could embed a video on each page (another cool feature we offer!), and ask a series of questions about that video on the page. You then could create more pages related to different videos. Randomize your pages, and eliminate the bias which may result from people having seen a certain video first.

Your survey results are too important to leave vulnerable to bias. Sign up for a Premium account for just $49.92 a month to try out this awesome, new bias-preventing feature!