Developing questionnaires

[Sandie]

It has been really useful to read some of the debate around the questionnaires and I agreed with many points, disagreed with many.  Not sure I can add anything to the debate on the usefulness of these questionnaires without spending a little more time on them but thought I would add my thoughts on how they are written.

As always with questionnaires, the way that the questions are worded will influence the response from the respondant.  And as always with questionnaires, those who want to deploy them have to have in mind lots of things like the time it will take, how often people are bombarded with questionnaires/surveys (especially now that we are in the digital age), how much data they need/want to collect.  The need to get a worthwhile response in terms of numbers also needs to be balanced against the quality of the response submitted.

So, there’s a lot to be considered.  Some of the ways we do this to try and dupe respondants into thinking it won’t take long – it’s just a quick survey, will only take 5 minutes of your time etc etc etc, is by complicating the questions and simplifying the answers, meaning one doesn’t fit always with the other.

Questionnaires are often one long list of questions but to try to shorten the list (and scrolling) two or three questions are built into one, sometimes without meaning to and then, of course, the response is meaningless as you don’t which part of the question was uppermost when selecting the response.

I was just attempting to respond to a survey about mobile learning and gave up because I couldn’t break the question down into its component parts (and there were very definitely component parts) to understand the focus of what the questioner was trying to get at in order to provide a useful response.  I found this to be the case with some of the questions in these quesionnaires too.

I have sometimes developed questionnaires in parts, starting with asking the respondant to think about or focus on such and such or ‘this part of the questionnaire is concerned with…’ so at least, that gives the respondant a fighting chance to respond in a useful way.

Am I way off the mark here?

 

 

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