SURVEYSYNERGY · RESEARCH GUIDES
A pilot survey checklist before you recruit participants
Check instructions, response scales, phone layouts and exports before inviting people into an honours or postgraduate survey.
Decide what the pilot is testing
A pilot can help you check whether people understand the questions, whether the survey works on their devices and how long it takes. Decide which problems you want it to uncover before collecting responses.
Testing a questionnaire’s usability and estimating its measurement properties are different tasks. A small set of trial responses can reveal confusing wording, but it does not automatically establish reliability or validity.
Walk through the participant experience
Open the shared link in a browser where you are not signed in. Check the first page, any eligibility steps, participant information and consent. Confirm that the invitation’s description matches what the participant actually encounters.
Try the survey on a phone. Look for scales that run off the screen, labels that repeat, missing instructions and pages that feel unnecessarily long. Time the whole journey, including any account setup, rather than just the questions.
Check the measures and the data
Compare each item against the version you intended to use. Check response anchors, item order, reverse-scored items and any shared introductory stems. If you randomise items, preserve the context needed to answer them and record the randomisation method.
Export a set of test responses and inspect it before collecting real data. Can you map every column back to the right item? Are response values usable for your analysis? Keep test responses separate from the research dataset.
Agree what happens next
Write down what would lead you to revise the survey, repeat the pilot or begin the main study. Decide in advance how you will treat incomplete or otherwise excluded responses. Changing exclusions after seeing a preferred result makes the analysis harder to interpret.
In SurveySynergy, use Preview while preparing the instrument. Publishing locks its content, so review the final version before opening recruitment. A published instrument is not evidence of ethics approval; that comes through the process required for your project.