Asking questions is generally about getting answers, not pissing people off, isn’t it? If you think otherwise, just forget it, but if we agree on this it’s worth noting that sometimes to ask questions means more than to barely inform someone what you would like them to tell you and wait.

Usually it just doesn’t work like “fire and forget”. Why? Because people are busy with things of great importance and urgency (even if they just seem to be seating and picking their nose), with delivering results they’re being accounted for and probably with thousands of other better things to be occupied with than answering your endless lists of questions. So what can you do?

In most cases the trick is to convince your respondent to cooperate with you during the process of finding answers instead of flooding them with a list of 987987 detailed questions (half of which is relevant only if they answer positively some previous one) and expecting to get them answered.

Starting with a small list of general questions, which then can be detailed depending on received answers, seems to be quite a good idea. First of all it’s easier to get someone to answer a short list of questions for you (even if finally there’s gonna be like fifty of these short lists).

Also, what is kind of important too, you can avoid asking a lot of irrelevant questions and save a lot of your respondents’ time.

And yeah, it means you have to interact with your respondents, explain a lot and be patient. But, believe it or not, it pays off — it takes less time and, above all, pisses people off a little bit less.