When developing a questionnaire for web administration, respondent burden is a major concern. It may be tempting to condense multiple questions into a single grid or other format to reduce the number of screens shown to the respondent. However, this may not accomplish its intended purpose. As time spent answering a single survey question varies by the question’s complexity and the cognitive burden placed on the respondent, condensed questions may not actually save time in some circumstances.

Using a question about which children in the household eat what school-provided meals, this experiment aims to test if more screens do take more time, even if the questions being asked are simpler to answer when kept separate. The decomposed version asks first which children eat school-provided meals (with an option for none) and then shows a simple grid listing only the relevant children and the two possible school meals (breakfast and lunch). The analysis compares the time to answer this series to the time to answer a comparable “condensed” survey item which uses a single grid to list all children in the household, and options for both possible school meals and “No meals”. Findings indicate that the decomposed version appears to be faster, but this is partially due to the number of households with no children who eat school-provided meals. In this case, the first question of the decomposed version is significantly faster than the condensed question. However, the condensed question is significantly faster for respondents with at least one child eating a school meal. The time saved in the decomposed version is greater than the time saved in the condensed version though, leading to the overall efficiency of the decomposed question.