Video – Questionnaire Design

Questionnaire design. This video will help you to understand how to design a questionnaire, which helps you to achieve the research goal, aims or objective. To begin with, aim is to maximize the chances of success and how one can do that. The aim of questionnaire design is to get as many responses as possible that are useful and accurate information would collect. To maximize your response rate give your questionnaire a short and meaningful title, keep the questionnaire as short and succinct as possible. Offer incentives for responding if appropriate. Be creative, use different color and images to make it attractive and make it convenient.

Clear instructions is one of the key part when designing the questionnaire, which helps you to maximize your response rate by providing clear information and instructions as

follows: State who you are, outline what is the purpose of the survey and why their response is important. Explain how answers will be treated with confidentiality and anonymity, unless agreed with the respondent. Provide clear instructions as to how each question should be answered, for example, whether you are expecting one or more answers or whether answers should be ranked, and if so, then rank should be available, for example, one as high or low. How to return the questionnaire and by what date is one of the most important part of the questionnaire which needs to be considered precisely. Types of questions, there are many different types of question you can use to get the information you need.

Generally, the questions will either be open-ended or closed-ended. Open questions allow the respondent to use their own words to answer, for example, what do you think are the main causes of racism? Whilst a closed question gives predefined options, for example, which of the following do you think are the main causes of racism? And you have option A, B, C, D available for them to choose. Some advantages and disadvantages of each are in the table below. They both are important. You need to use the mixed set of open and closed question. However, one must understand the importance of using more closed questions and less open questions to engage the respondent fully. Let’s see what’s the advantages and disadvantages.

Open question elicits rich qualitative data, encourage thought and freedom of expression, may discourage response from less literate respondents. If too many open questions, maybe some people, they are not able to write. Takes longer to answer and may put some people off. The more open questions you’ll have in your questionnaire, people may not feel like to fill your questionnaire as they don’t find themselves engaged or probably they don’t have time. Open questions are more difficult to analyze, the response can be easily misinterpreted. So when you do the analysis part, it is difficult to convert the open questions answer to numeric form of data.

Whereas closed question elicits quantitative data, can encourage mindless replies, so this advantage is, are easy for all literacy levels to respond, so you just need to use mostly ticks, are quick to answer and may improve your response rate. If you have a questionnaire which contains 10 closed question and two open question, people might think, “Yes, that can be done quickly and I am happy to fill that questionnaire.” Closed questions are easy to ‘code’ and analyze as there are numeric form of data information available. General principles when writing

questions: avoid leading questions. For example, “Wouldn’t you say? “, “Isn’t it fair to say?” These questions are leading questions when you are putting your perception to the participant in your point of view. Be specific.

Avoid words like: “regularly”, “often”, or “locally”, as everyone’s idea of what is regular, often, and local will be different. Avoid jargons and colloquialisms. This may confuse the meaning of the question. Avoid double-barreled questions. For example, do you enjoy playing badminton and tennis? Or, “Do you agree with the recommendations of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change?” Ask for one piece of information at a time. Avoid double negatives. Instead of asking respondents whether they agree with the negative statements, for example, “Smoking in public places should not be abolished”, use the positive. How? “Smoking in public places should be abolished”. Minimize the biasness. People sometimes answer questions in a way they perceive to be socially acceptable.

Make it easy for respondent to admit social lapses by wording question carefully. For example, “How many times have you broken the speed limit because you were late?” That could be rephrased in a way, for example, “Have you ever felt under pressure to drive over the speed limit in order to keep an appointment?” Then you could ask, “How many times have you prioritized the appointment over keeping the speed limit?”

Handling difficult or embarrassing questions: to encourage a greater response to difficult question, explain why you need to know that information. For example, “It would be very helpful if you could give us some information about yourself to help us put your answer in context.” In short, options are mutually exclusive. How many years have you worked in academia? For example, 0-5, 6-10, 11-15, and they are not like 0-5, and 5-10. The reason why, the person who has five-year experience in academia may choose either a first option or second option in the not category. So it’ll make your data bias. It is important to ensure the options are mutually exclusive and they are not overlapped.

For example, Tilly wants to know people’s opinion on the outcome of a recent election, she plans to use the following questionnaire or

a question: do you agree that this new government will be a disaster? She provide two options, yes and no. If we write down two criticisms of a hard question and construct a better question or a questionnaire, that would look like this. First, the criticism is that Tilly’s question is a leading question. She leads people into agreeing with her opinion that the new government will be a disaster. Second criticism is that there is not enough options for somebody who might have no opinion on this matter, so they could be neutral about it. Here is the example of improved question, how do you feel about the newly appointed government? Mostly positive, mostly negative, neutral, don’t know, don’t have any opinion on that.