Questionnaires

Questionnaires

Types
1. Mail Survey
2. Group-administered questionnaire
3. Household drop-off survey
Reason for use
1. Well-designed questionnaires can allow relationships between data to be identified
2. Questionnaires protect respondent anonymity
3. As research instruments, questionnaires can be used time and time again to measure differences between groups of people
4. If coded in an appropriate way, they can enable analysis to be conducted extremely quickly and with low error rates.
5. Researcher retains control over the research
Limitations
1. When you know your research topic and its issues, it can be difficult to avoid leading questions
2. 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
3. Respondents can find it irritating to be asked to indicate their age
4. Questionnaires, in the main, should be used for focused and direct questions
5. Try to be as clear as possible in wording your question. Avoiding unclear and ambiguous questions.
Design issues
1. To maximise response rates consider the use of a covering letter for your questionnaire
2. A questionnaire should take no more than about twenty minutes to complete
3. When designing a questionnaire it is easy to overlook mistakes and ambiguities in question layout and construction.
4. Many research projects take the approach of selecting a stratified sample.
5. Many questionnaires are now designed to be completed online, via the internet.
Data analysis
1. The development of appropriate codes and coding should be considered when designing any research instrument.
2. This type of instrument allows
  1. The data from questionnaires can be gathered quickly and then presented in a form more useable for subsequent analysis.
  2. The answers or responses can be coded (i.e. reduced to a number) by the researcher or those responsible for developing the questionnaire.
  3. Enables the transmission of useful and accurate information or data from the respondent to the researcher
Definition
1. The questionnaire is the favoured tool of many of those engaged in research
2. And it can often provide a cheap and effective way of collecting data in a structured and manageable form.
3. Benefits
  1. They are usually inexpensive to administer
  2. very little training is needed to develop them
  3. And they can be easily and quickly analysed once completed

Next up

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by Sergio Angeles over 6 years ago