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.

Course fee payable to SRA.

  This course contributes 6 hours to the MRS CPD programme