We\u2019ve talked in the past about what questions you might want to consider including<\/a> in your surveys. We\u2019ve told you about things to avoid<\/a> when putting together customer feedback surveys<\/a>. And we\u2019ve discussed some biases that can be involved<\/a> when employees administer a customer satisfaction survey incorrectly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this post, we\u2019re going to dive into one of many oft-discussed market research questions: Where should the \u201coverall\u201d question go in a survey? Should it be first or last? This question applies to a wide variety of survey subjects: customer satisfaction, employee engagement, product evaluation, event evaluation, website design evaluation…just about any survey on any subject eventually seems to include some type of summary, overall rating question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To give you an idea of how long this item has been researched, I found an article from 1975<\/a> in The Public Opinion Quarterly<\/i>, a journal published by the American Association for Public Opinion Research<\/a>. This article referred to research conducted in 1959 on the topic of \u201cQuestionnaire Construction and Interview Procedure.\u201d In 55 years, the answer hasn\u2019t really changed: how you order your questions depends on what you want to get from the respondent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t