Online questionnaires are now a standard part of research in psychology, sociology and other social sciences. Yet their design has not changed much over the past decade - most still rely on text-based items that the participant reads and completes. But in an era when the vast majority of content on the Internet consists of short videos, it begs the question: what if, instead of reading the items, the participant watched a video where the question was read by a person on the screen? The video format could be more accessible to people with lower reading literacy, increasing respondents' motivation and sense of engagement. However, such a format has not yet been thoroughly tested in the field of psychological scales. A new study, co-authored by our member Hynek Cígler, responds to this research gap. Interestingly, the article is based on the original bachelor's thesis of the second author, Adam Stroil, defended at the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Social Sciences of MUNI. Moreover, he took the second place in the Czech section of the International Student Psychology Days 2024, the thesis was supervised by Hynek Cígler.
The two authors decided to compare two forms of online psychological questionnaire administration - the classic text-based form and the new video-based form. They were interested in whether the two forms differed in the psychometric properties of the scales, respondent satisfaction, length of completion, or potential response bias. The study involved 321 respondents aged 15 to 72 years, with the majority being young adults. Half of the participants were assigned to a group that completed the questionnaire in the form of short videos with a male or female interviewer, while the other half received the same items in text form.
Video as the future of questionnaires? Potential with further need for exploration
The results showed that the video format of the questionnaire was fully comparable to the text format psychometrically. For both test scales used, it was confirmed that the items measure the same thing regardless of whether the participant hears them from the video or reads them. Similarly, measurement reliability was comparable for both formats, often slightly higher for the video version. Another important finding was that the video format was rated as more entertaining. This confirmed the authors' hypothesis that the new mode of administration may evoke the feeling of a ‘real interview’, which is a welcome change from simply reading the text when completing questionnaires. Another surprising finding was that the video format did not take more time in administration, even taking respondents less time to complete than the text version in one version. A possible explanation may be that the apparent presence of the interviewer helps people to concentrate more, and spoken questions may be easier to understand than complexly written text. The results also did not support concerns about higher rates of socially desirable responses. There were no differences in responses between the formats for either men or women for the self-esteem or body image questions. Thus, the video format did not lead to greater caution or self-censorship.
The results of the study suggest that psychological research can also move towards formats that are closer to the current way of consuming information - that is, towards videos. Nevertheless, the authors point out some limitations: the research was conducted on a predominantly young and digitally savvy population, and so it is not yet possible to generalise the results to older age groups. For them, the video format might have a different impact - for example, due to lower technological proficiency or a different level of comfort with audiovisual content. The authors recommend that future research should focus on different target groups and also explore topics with higher sensitivity, where the form of administration might play a greater role. There is also great potential for artificial intelligence, which can generate video questionnaires automatically without the need for costly and complex filming of live actors. This is a possibility that the two authors are testing in follow-up research these days.
Recommended citation:
Strojil, A., & Cígler, H. (2025). Video-administered questionnaire: Psychometric properties and comparison with a text-based format. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 19, 100714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2025.100714
