Academic survey questions, examples, and a step-by-step guide

Use SurveyPlanet for your academic research and gather real data that supports your thesis.

If you want to deepen your knowledge about a particular subject by testing theories, then academic surveys are invaluable. Coming up with a hypothesis is hard enough and a well-designed survey—with carefully constructed questions—will help you test how viable your hypothesis actually is.

The best survey tool for academic research

SurveyPlanet is a great tool for creating academic surveys that will let you put theoretical knowledge into practice and learn by doing. With dozens of templates that include pre-written questions, you will learn right away what a great academic survey should look like.

You’ll also find powerful features like question branching, survey-length estimation, four chart types to display results, and many more when you sign up for a SurveyPlanet account to create an academic survey. Our user-friendly designs will make both creating and filling out surveys a simple yet exciting experience for both you and your respondents.

A step-by-step guide to creating a successful academic survey

You probably learned that conducting an academic survey is a proven way to get valuable insights. However, reading hundreds of pages can be tiring no matter how important. Because of that, we’ve decided to help you by providing simple yet powerful ways to create a successful academic survey, ease your mind, and get you up to speed:

First, gather your thoughts by putting them on paper in order to create a strategy for a successful academic survey.
Set one ultimate goal, then divide this into smaller, actionable steps that will lead to achieving it.
Consider your hypothesis and figure out how an academic survey will help you confirm it.
Before creating questions, decide or learn who will be your target group.
After you know your target group, think about how big your sample should be to produce statistically significant data. You can do that with our free survey sample size calculator.
Whether you need one hundred or one thousand responses, think about where your target sample hangs out and how you’ll distribute the survey. Share a survey link with different communities on social media and reach out to friends and acquaintances. Maybe they aren’t your target group, but a friend of a friend is. Don’t get discouraged, people love to help with academic research.
Books are one thing, real-life data is another. Think about implementing what you already know in your academic survey and how that knowledge can serve a higher purpose.
When writing questions make sure to use different types, such as multiple choice, Likert scale, open-ended, image choice, and ranking questions. This will make your survey more engaging and fewer people will drop out because they didn't make it through to the end.
Be brief and concise, both with questions and the survey itself. Think about whether some questions are really necessary. Write questions with straightforward language.
Make sure your survey isn’t too long. That will put respondents off. With a survey length estimate, you don’t have to manually estimate the length, since SurveyPlanet can do that for you.
Creating an academic survey and gathering data is great, but you also need to analyze the results. Figure out which method you’ll use before distributing the survey and analyze the quantitative data first (because it’s more straightforward).

While we can't promise that, with the help of our survey tools, you will attain academic excellence in no time, we are sure that our tools will provide a valuable service in your research endeavors. In fact, our mission is to facilitate all the stages of conducting research, from ideation to analysis. That is why we made guidelines covering every step of the process, from creating a survey to survey data analysis for better insights.

Creating your academic survey online is one of the least expensive—but effective—ways to gather all the data you need. People are more eager to respond to an online survey in their free time, from the comfort of their homes. With SurveyPlanet as your partner, you will garner a high response rate and much useful data.

Academic surveys questions and examples

The quality of questions directly influences the quality of data. At the end of the day, it’s the quality of results that matter. Because of that, we pay special attention to creating academic survey questions that are useful for both students and respondents. Academic surveys usually require some demographic questions, including:

Please select your age range:

18 or younger
18-22
23-30
31-40
41-50
51-60

Please select your gender:

Male
Female
Other

What’s your marital status?

Married
Single
Divorced
Widowed

What’s the highest level of education you’ve completed?

Less than high school
High school
Bachelor degree
Masters degree
PhD

Which category best describes your employment status?

Employed full-time (40 hours a week or more)
Employed part-time (less than 40 hours a week)
Unemployed
Retired

Which category best fits the yearly household income of every member combined?

$0-$19,999
$20,000-$59,999
$60,000-$99,999
$100,000-$149,999
$150,000 or more

Academic surveys can explore and research many different topics. It just depends on what your area of interest is. Here are some academic survey examples to give you a better idea:

Healthcare surveys

With healthcare surveys, you can research patient demographics, figure out how accessible healthcare is, some common issues people encounter, and ways to improve performance.

Education surveys

Student satisfaction is a topic for which there is always more to ask and say. Using education surveys, you can explore students’ habits, assess the quality of their education, and research teachers’ working conditions.

HR surveys

From employee satisfaction to work-life balance, HR surveys are an inexhaustible source for researching and studying workplace issues.

Brand surveys

Research consumer demographics and how they perceive different brands to draw conclusions based on the data you collect.