Questionnaires

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Questionnaires

• A.N. Oppenheim, Questionnaire Design

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Questionnaires

• FOCUS
• What is the focus of your questionnaire?

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Questionnaires

• The focus of your questionnaire is your research
  question
• All questions in your questionnaire need to be
  relevant to your research question.

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Questionnaires

• To help further with the focus identify intended
  audience for your questionnaire is it a
  particular organisation, a particular group of
  people, or everyone?

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Questionnaires

• ELEMENTS
• What are the parts of a questionnaire?

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Questionnaires

• PREAMBLE
• Explain what the survey is for This survey sets
  out to ...
• Reassure the participants Please note if you
  fill in this questionnaire, your answers will be
  treated in highly confidential way. Neither I,
  the Dublin Institute of Technology nor any other
  third part will identify your name, email address
  or any other personal details, nor will it be
  possible to identify you in any way in the report
  I will publish as part of my MSc dissertation. I
  would like to personally thank you for your time
  in taking part in this survey.

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Questionnaires

• TYPES OF QUESTIONS
• Open-ended
• Close-ended
• Combination of both

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Questionnaires

• Open-ended Close-ended

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Questionnaires

• Open-ended
• Slower to administer
• Harder to record responses
• Does not stifle response
• Answerer can raise new issues
• Answerer feels they can speak their mind
• What does a blank answer mean ?

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Questionnaires

• Close-ended
• Faster to administer
• Easier to record responses
• Answerer can only give predefined answers
• Answerer cannot raise new issues
• Answerer feels constrained
• More likely to answer all questions (box tick)

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Questionnaires

• LIKERT SCALES
• A special type of close-ended question is where
  you get the respondent to classify their
  responses on a scale of 1 to 5 (or in any five
  ordinal categories).

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Questionnaires

• LIKERT SCALES
• Poor, Weak, O.K., Good, Excellent
• Very Low, Low, O.K., High, Very High
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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Questionnaires

• LIKERT SCALES
• To make life easier for yourself, you dont need
  to label each of the five values if you dont
  need to.

Very Bad
Very Good 1 2 3
4 5
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Thank them

• CLOSING REMARKS
• "Thank you for taking the time to participate in
  this survey"

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Questionnaires

• DESIGN
• How will I design the questions?

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Questionnaires

• Think clearly about questions (need to constrain
  answers as much as possible)
• Make sure results will answer your research
  question
• You can use the Internet for conducting surveys
  if you need to cover wide geographic reach

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Questionnaires

• Check your grammar, twice
• Its a proofreaders' Rule of Thumb that if you
  read something twice, it gets rid of 95 of
  errors.

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Questionnaires

• Keep questions short and simple
• Avoid questions with not
• Avoid questions with bias
• Avoid sensitive questions (ask indirectly)
• Do not ask compound questions, just ask one
  question at a time
• e.g. "Do you know what services are available to
  you and how to find out?"

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Questionnaires

• DESIGN
• How will I design the questions?

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Questionnaires

• Before you deploy to participants, deploy a few
  pilot versions of the questionnaire to friends,
  family and fellow students.
• Correct any complicated, misstated, or ambiguous
  questions

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Questionnaires

• Deployment Approaches
• Self-administered
• Interviewer administered

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Questionnaires

• Self-administered
• Means you give the questionnaire to the
  participants and they fill it out in their own
  time, at their own pace.
• This approach can allow you to reach large
  audiences, e.g. by deploying over the Internet.
• The problem is that if they dont understand a
  question, they will probably guess what it means,
  and that answer with be invalid.

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Questionnaires

• Interviewer administered
• Means you are present when participant or
  participants are filling out the questionnaire.
• If you are dealing with an individual or group
  you can instruct them how to fill out the
  questionnaire I want everyone to start with
  question 1, spend about 30 seconds on that ...
  O.K. now move onto the next question, etc.
• If they dont understand a question, they can ask
  you, and you can tell the individual or group.

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Incentives

• Survey research suggests that there is a chance
  that offering an incentive may add bias to a
  survey
• e.g. Singer, E., Bossarte, R., 2006, Incentives
  for Survey Participation When Are They
  Coercive?, American Journal of Preventive
  Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 5, Pages 411-418

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Incentives

• More refs
• http//www.ijis.net/ijis1_1/ijis1_1_goeritz.pdf
• http//www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/mort
  on/Incentives_24June06.pdf
• http//www.iser.sx.ac.uk/publications/working-pape
  rs/iser/2007-01.pdf
• http//www.isr.umich.edu/src/smp/Electronic20Copi
  es/51-Draft106.pdf
• http//www.nber.org/chapters/c10111.pdf

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Questionnaires

• EXAMPLES
• Can I see a few examples of questions?

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Questionnaires

• The following is an example of a questionnaire
  that was developed by a student who was comparing
  text-based information with a visual
  representation of the same information gtgtgt

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Questionnaires
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Questionnaires

• What do you think of the questions on the
  following slide gtgtgt

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Questionnaires
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Questionnaires
Unclear Question and Over-Specified Answers
Compound Question and Over-Specified Answers
Asymmetric Answers
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Other Useful Approaches
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Focus groups

• Take time to arrange, so prepare in advance (use
  an intermediary to help you if you can)
• Who will be in your focus group? (e.g. age,
  gender)
• Size of focus group (8-10 is typical)
• Consider whether or not to have separate focus
  groups for different ages or genders (e.g.
  discussing sex and sexuality)

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Site visits and observation

• Site visits involve visiting an organization,
  community project etc
• Consider using a guide
• Observation is when you visit a location and
  observe what is going on, drawing your own
  conclusions
• Both facilitate making your research more
  relevant and concrete

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Case studies

• Method of capturing and presenting concrete
  details of real or fictional situations in a
  structured way
• Good for comparative analysis

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Participatory research

• Allows participation of community being
  researched in research process (e.g. developing
  research question choosing methodology
  analysing results)
• Good way to ensure research does not simply
  reinforce prejudices and presumptions of
  researcher
• Good for raising awareness in community and
  developing appropriate action plans