Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Questionnaires
- Types
- Mail Survey
- Group-administered
questionnaire
- Household drop-off survey
- Reason for use
- Well-designed questionnaires can allow
relationships between data to be identified
- Questionnaires protect respondent anonymity
- As research instruments, questionnaires can
be used time and time again to measure
differences between groups of people
- If coded in an appropriate way, they can enable analysis to
be conducted extremely quickly and with low error rates.
- Researcher retains control over the research
- Limitations
- When you know your research topic and its issues, it can
be difficult to avoid leading questions
- The questionnaire may seek to gather a great deal of
information, but it would be a mistake to think that
complex questions will harvest a greater yield of
information
- Respondents can find it irritating to be
asked to indicate their age
- Questionnaires, in the main, should
be used for focused and direct
questions
- Try to be as clear as possible in wording your
question. Avoiding unclear and ambiguous
questions.
- Design issues
- To maximise response rates consider the use
of a covering letter for your questionnaire
- A questionnaire should take no more than
about twenty minutes to complete
- When designing a questionnaire it is easy
to overlook mistakes and ambiguities in
question layout and construction.
- Many research projects take the approach of
selecting a stratified sample.
- Many questionnaires are now designed to be
completed online, via the internet.
- Data analysis
- The development of appropriate codes and coding should be considered
when designing any research instrument.
- This type of instrument allows
- The data from questionnaires can be gathered quickly and then
presented in a form more useable for subsequent analysis.
- The answers or responses can be coded (i.e. reduced to a
number) by the researcher or those responsible for
developing the questionnaire.
- Enables the transmission of useful and accurate
information or data from the respondent to the
researcher
- Definition
- The questionnaire is the favoured tool of many
of those engaged in research
- And it can often provide a cheap and effective way
of collecting data in a structured and manageable
form.
- Benefits
- They are usually
inexpensive to administer
- very little training is
needed to develop them
- And they can be easily and
quickly analysed once
completed