Ideal and Maximum Length for a Web Survey

This paper aims to discover ‘How long can/should a survey be?’ by asking the question to respondents themselves in a web survey implemented by the Netquest fieldwork company in Mexico in 2016. It is a question that is frequently asked, even if research has already been carried out on the impact of survey length on non-response or data quality. The study conducted for this paper concluded that the ideal survey length is a median of 10 minutes and that the maximum survey length is 20 minutes. The reported lengths were significantly linked to the fact that respondents liked answering the survey and that they trusted that their data are treated in an anonymous way, but were not found to be linked to the socio-demographic variables tested, except age in the case of maximum length.