Questionnaire layout and national culture in online psychometrics

Given the proliferation of online psychometric questionnaires on the Internet and other platforms, the design of online psychometrics becomes increasingly important to ensure good measurement properties. The current study reports four experiments testing how questionnaire layout and national culture affect people’s responses to online questionnaires. Flowand the disorientation scales for web navigation had good psychometric quality overall and across experimental manipulations of questionnaire layout, field dependence, national culture, response correction and question grouping. However, single-item layout (presenting one question at a time) had the advantage of faster completion than whole-form layout (presenting each page filled with items). Support was also found for the idea that whole form divides and thereby requires more attention to respond. Future research should be directed at online psychometrics on small and large displays.