Questionnaires

Questionnaires

1. Types

   • Mail Survey
   • Group-administered questionnaire
   • Household drop-off survey

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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