Questionnaire design
A questionnaire is a document designed for the purpose of seeking
specific information from the respondents.
types:
The questionnaire may be
1-self-administered
2- Administered by interviewers.
The self-administered questionnaire approach is cheap, less susceptible to
interviewer bias and can be administered by mail. At the same time, the
rate of non-response may be high, and may bias the results. Also, answers
may be incomplete.
Types of questions
:
There are two major question formats:
1- The open-ended and closed-response types.
2- closed-response question, the respondent is provided with a list of pre-
determined response options. Open-ended questions elicit more detailed
responses, but the responses require more effort to encode for data
analysis.
A questionnaire may include both question formats.
Closed-response questions may be used to elicit attitudes of the
respondents to a certain statement. format, the respondent chooses from
among: strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, strongly disagree. In
the forced-choice format, responses are limited to:
strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. This format does
not allow an undecided answer.
Questions should be well worded to avoid any ambiguity. Questions
should not be phrased in a way that influences the response in one
direction or another. The questionnaire should always be pre-tested in a
pilot study before the main survey. Interviewers should be trained to
make sure that the questionnaire is administered in a uniform way.
A questionnaire typically includes the following components:
• an introductory statement by the interviewer to introduce herself/himself
and explain the purpose of the questionnaire; the respondents should also
be informed about the confidentiality of their responses;
• demographic questions to collect relevant information about the
background of the respondent;
• factual questions; opinion questions: opinion questions require
reflection; it is generally easier for the respondent to answer factual
questions; putting the factual questions first serves as a “warm up” to the
opinion questions;
• closing statement by the interviewer to thank the respondents, and
where appropriate to ask if s/he wants to provide any additional comment.
A method commonly used to test for reliability in results obtained by
questionnaires is to look for internal consistency, that is the extent to
which the responses on different questions correlate with each other. If
they tend to be highly correlated with each other, then the test is said to
be internally consistent. The computer programme can be built up to
detect inconsistency.There is a tendency among investigators to put too
many questions. This has been encouraged by the introduction of
computer-assisted analysis. Information collected in a questionnaire
should be based on and limited to the objectives of the study.