Introduction/overview
This course is aimed at giving participants a
thorough grounding in questionnaire design. This course will be highly
participatory, with sessions aimed at providing hands-on experience of
designing questionnaires and survey questions, for quantitative social
research.
Objectives
By the end of the course participants should:
- Have a greater awareness of the different aspects involved in writing good survey questions and questionnaires
- Be able to design questions that:
- meet research objectives,
- take analysis considerations into account,
- take account of primacy and recency effects,
- avoid ambiguous words or concepts,
- avoid writing multiple questions in one,
- minimise problems of recall error and telescoping.
- Have the tools to critique existing surveys
Topics
- Questionnaire and measurement error
- Concepts to indicators
- General principles of question design
- Designing response options
- Writing questionnaires for different modes
- Reviewing survey questions
- Your questions and questionnaire design challenges
Who will benefit?
A general familiarity with quantitative research methods is assumed,
but it is not necessary to have experience of using these methods. You
will find this course useful if:
- you are new to survey research
- you need to design survey questionnaires for the first time
- you commission or manage survey research in central or local
government, health or other applied policy sectors and need to
understand the issues associated with questionnaire design.
Learning outcomes
- Participants will have a good awareness of the optimal ways to
word individual questions and create the questionnaire as a whole.
Course tutors
Ruxandra Comanaru is a Research Director working in
the Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub at NatCen. Since joining
NatCen, Ruxandra has worked of a variety of projects, designing
questionnaires, as well as using cognitive interviews to test and refine
the questions. Ruxandra also combines cognitive methods with usability
testing methods to ensure that online questionnaires (desktop and
mobile) are fit for purpose. Prior to joining NatCen, Ruxandra was a
Lecturer in Quantitative and Qualitative Social Research Methods at
Birkbeck, University of London. She completed a PhD in Applied
Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck.
Emma Corteen is a Researcher working within NatCen’s
Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub. Since joining NatCen, Emma
has worked on a wide range of projects which have focused on designing
questionnaires and cognitively testing survey questions. Her main
research interests lie in survey question design and the
cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comprehension of survey questions.
Prior to joining NatCen, Emma completed a PhD in Linguistics at the
University of Cambridge and has designed and conducted a variety of
research projects in both academic and non-academic settings.
This course contributes 6 hours to the MRS CPD programme