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

Debbie Collins is an experienced survey researcher, methodologist and trainer at NatCen. She led NatCen’s Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub from 2012-2015 and has led methodological reviews for a range of organisations.

Course fee payable to SRA.

  This course contributes 6 hours to the MRS CPD programme.

n.b. This course runs over two consecutive mornings:

Part 1 - 5 November - 9.30 am to 1.00 pm

Part 2 - 6 November - 9.30 am to 1.00 pm