SDA: Questionnaire Design Flashcards
What are the two main types of survey?
- Self-administered
2. Interview-administered
How can self-administered surveys be delivered?
- Post
- Drop and Collect distribution
- Online
What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-administered surveys?
Advantages:
- Cheaper than telephone/personal interviews
- Quicker
- No interviewer influence
Disadvantages:
- Attention must be paid to question style/layout - time-consuming
- Respondents can read whole questionnaire before responding
- Don’t know who answered it
- Poor response rate
How can interview-administered surveys be delivered?
- Face-to-face structured interviews
- Same as above but a list of possible responses may be shown to participant
- Face-to-face semi-structured interviews
- Telephone
What are the advantages and disadvantages of interview administered surveys?
Advantages:
- In-depth
- Telephone: effects of personal and social characteristics aren’t produced
Disadvantages:
- Interviewer influence
- Time-consuming
- Telephone - can’t use visual aids
What things should be considered when designing a questionnaire?
- Maintain appropriate focus
- Straight forward/easy to understand (concept clarity)
- Piloting - several edits may be needed
- Clear and neat presentation
- Filtering and ‘skip patterns’ clearly thought out
- Appropriate length
- Cost, time and resources
- As much detail as possible
What are the two main types of questions?
Open questions
Closed questions
What are open questions?
Free responses
No pre-defined answers
Shouldn’t be used frequently in quantitative research
What are closed questions?
Range of responses to select
Quick and easy
Lacks depth if brief
How can response rates to questionnaires be maximised?
- Keep questionnaire short
- Keep it well laid out
- Make it easy to use
- Provide an incentive
Examples of closed question types
'Yes' or 'No' Category Checklists Spectrum e.g. on a scale of 1-10 Grid/Table
After piloting a questionnaire or interview, what things should be considered?
- Were any questions too personal and therefore made respondents uncomfortable?
- Were any questions asked >1 time because they were complicated?
- Were any questions misunderstood?
- Difficult to read?
- Did it take too long to administer?
- Were there sections where respondents wanted to give lengthier answers but couldn’t?
What is the average response rate for a postal questionnaire?
40%
