Creating a Questionnaire Library with ChatGPT

Ray Poynter, 24 January

One of the ways that people are using ChatGPT is to create more standardisation in the questionnaires and discussion guides they produce and, simultaneously, speed up the production of a first draft. There are two ways that I see people doing this:

1. Upload a library at the start of the questionnaire or discussion guide creation, describe the project and get ChatGPT to create your first draft. This approach would also work with most/all of the other Gen AI systems.
2. Create a CustomGPT based on your library and use that when creating discussion guides or questionnaires.

Use ChatGPT to Create the Library
To create my libraries, I uploaded PDF copies of my recent projects to ChatGPT and asked it to create a library for me, which I then exported as a Word document.

The prompts took a bit of playing around with to get the Library right. My first request was to tell ChatGPT that I was a market researcher and wanted to create a library of questions that I could use as the template for future studies. I asked it to read the PDFs I had uploaded and to create my library.

The next iteration of my prompt was necessary because ChatGPT just gave me a list of questions. So, I asked ChatGPT to indicate whether the question was open-ended or closed, and if it was a closed question, to indicate the breaks/options and whether it was a multi or single select.

I made a few more tweaks, some with prompts and some by directly editing the draft library in Canvas mode. When I was happy with it, I exported the Questionnaire Library.

Testing the Library
To test the library, I created a few questionnaires. To do this, I started a new ChatGPT session for each test (I did not want it to remember the creation process or the previous tests); I uploaded the Questionnaire Library, described the questionnaire I wanted and told it to use the library to create it. In all of the test cases, I was pretty happy with the output as a first draft.

Next Steps
I intend to add some notes to the library to cover things like always asking the screening questions first, always putting the demographics last, always putting an evaluation before diagnostics, etc. These will then be the default, and I can always vary them when needed.

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