What is a questionnaire?
- A formalised set of questions for obtaining information from respondents
When should you use a questionnaire?
- When doing primary research (qualitative and quantitative) and secondary research (internal and external)
What is a survey?
- A practice that can entail various techniques or tools e.g. telephone, personal, mail or digital
Why is a cover letter needed?
- legitimate purpose of research
- rationale, why the research is important, and how info will be used
- contact person for questions and affiliation of that person
- ensure confidentiality
- return of the survey serves as consent
- time it will take to complete survey
- in case of sensitive questions, add a statement saying the respondents can omit any question they prefer not to answer
- appreciation for participation
What is the first step of the questionnaire design process? Explain?
- To develop question topics which ensure that the questionnaire covers all relevant components of the research problem.
The topics may be respondent specific:
- facts and knowledge
- opinions
- motives
- past behaviour
- likely future behaviour
What is the second step of the questionnaire design process?
- To select question and response formats.
When creating a questionnaire with open (unstructured) questions, explain its characteristics?
- wide range of potential answers. Potentially more affluent information e.g. the reasons they make a decision
- need to motivate the respondents
- involves editing and coding (requires expertise in interpreting the answers, and time consuming)
- difficult to deal with complex questions (forced to be put in categories)
What do closed (structured) questions require a respondent to do?
- To make a selection from a predefined list of responses. Always allow 'do not know' or 'do not want to answer', may lead to follow up questions.
Characteristics of Closed questions?
- dichotomous questions vs MCQ's ( collectively exhaustive, mutual exhaustive)
- uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional format
- continuous vs itemised rating
- comparative vs non-comparative
- forced vs non-forced
- balanced vs non-balanced
- labelling vs pictorial representation
State and Explain the third step of the QD process?
- To select wording.
- There can be ambiguous, double- barrelled, leading/loaded or implicit questions.
- It is best to use ordinary and simple vocabulary which reflects the respondents level of vocabulary
What is the fourth step of the QD process?
- To determine the sequence- response rate.
Discuss the requirements of determining the sequence-response rate?
- Be interesting, be logical by clustering questions.
- Difficult, sensitive or complex questions should be placed late in one sequence. Respondents then feel obliged to finish them.
- General questions should precede specific questions i.e. funneling technique.
- Branching questions should be designed carefully to cover all possible contingencies.
- What is the fifth step of the QD process?
- To design the layout and appearance.
What to consider when designing a questionnaire?
- Space- avoid looking cluttered
- Divide a questionnaire into several sections
- Questionnaires should be pre-coded
- Questionnaires should be numbered serially and each question should be numbered, especially for branching questions, with progress info.