Recruitment questionnaires

Recruitment questionnaires are used in qualitative research and for recruit­ment of respondents for some types of quantitative research (eg clinics held in central locations). The purpose of this type of questionnaire is to identify eligible respondents in order to invite them to attend the main research session. Consequently, the data collected should be limited

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Collecting unbiased and accurate data by questionnaire

Clearly, the data collected should be as accurate as possible. However, complete accuracy is almost impossible to obtain in surveys where respondents are asked to report their behaviour or their attitudes. Many problems arise because of problems within the questionnaire itself. These can include: ambiguity in the question; order effects between questions; order effects

Interviewer-administered interviews

The key benefits of having an interviewer administer the questionnaire are: Queries about the meaning of a question can be dealt with. A misunderstood question may be corrected. Respondents can be encouraged to provide deeper responses to open questions. Sometimes a question can be unintentionally ambiguous. Although this should have been spotted and corrected

Self-completion surveys

Self-completion methods, whether paper based or electronic, can benefit from the complete absence of an interviewer from the process. This removes a major source of potential bias in the responses, and makes it easier for respondents to be honest about sensitive subjects. However, self-completion studies can also suffer from there being no interviewer to

Introduction

A questionnaire that is going to provide accurate, good-quality informa­tion needs to be thought about and planned, before a single question is written. The sequence of the different topics that may be covered by the questionnaire, the sequence of individual questions and the sequence in which prompted responses are given can all dramatically affect

Defining the information required in the questionnaire

It should be clear from the research objectives and the business objectives what information areas the questionnaire needs to cover. This is the prin­cipal information such as product and brand awareness and usage, behavioural patterns, attitudes, satisfaction with service, response to concept or test product, etc. The level of detail to which it is

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Sequencing the sections of the questionnaire

The questionnaire can be properly planned once the principal and analy­sis information requirements have been decided. It is most commonly divided into three sections: exclusion or security question; screening questions; main questionnaire. Source: Brace Ian (2018), Questionnaire Design: How to Plan, Structure and Write Survey Material for Effective Market Research, Kogan Page; 4th

Exclusion question in the questionnaire

A common, although not universal, practice is to exclude respondents from research surveys who work in market research, marketing or the client’s industry. This will normally be the first question, so that they can be identified and excluded as quickly as possible and neither the respon­dent’s nor the interviewer’s time is wasted. Exclusion by

Screening questions in the questionnaire

Following the exclusion question, the next part of the questionnaire will be to screen the respondents for eligibility for the survey, depending on whether or not they belong to the research population. Few studies do not have a requirement for a screening section. In many surveys the researcher only wants to interview people with

Main questionnaire

The main questionnaire can now be planned. Once into the main questionnaire, the writer must consider the order in which the various topics are presented to the respondents. As a rule, it is better to work from the most general topics through to the most specific. Thus, the interview might start with questions about

Question types in the questionnaire

Any question in an interview can be classified in a number of different ways: open or closed, depending whether or not the answer can come only from a finite number of possible responses; spontaneous or prompted, depending on whether respondents are asked to reply in their own words or given a number of options

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Open and closed questions in the questionnaire

An open question is one where the range of possible answers is not suggested in the question and which respondents are expected to answer in their own words: ‘What did you eat for breakfast today?’ An open question may expect a short answer, where the anticipated answer would simply be one or more products,

Spontaneous questions in the questionnaire

A spontaneous question is any question for which the respondent is not given a repertoire of possible answers from which to choose. All open- ended questions are by their nature spontaneous, but not all spontaneous questions need be open-ended. Spontaneous questions will be used when the questionnaire writer does not know what the range

Prompted questions in the questionnaire

Spontaneous responses rarely tell the researcher the complete picture regarding what the respondent knows or feels, but only what is front-of- mind. However, most people find it difficult to articulate everything that they know or feel about a subject, or they forget that they know some­thing, or they have given one answer and aren’t

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Open-ended questions in the questionnaire

An open-ended question is an open question where the response is recorded verbatim. An open-ended question is nearly always also an open question. (It would be wasteful to record yes-no answers verbatim.) Open-ended questions are also known as ‘unstructured’ or ‘free- response’ questions. Open-ended questions are used for a number of reasons: The researcher

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Pre-coded questions in the questionnaire

1. Pre-coded open questions Frequently with interviewer-administered surveys, a list of pre-codes is provided with open questions for the interviewer’s use. This may simply be a brand list on which to code the response to a question such as ‘Which brand of breakfast cereal did you eat today?’ or it may be used in

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Data types in the questionnaire

Responses are measured using four types of data: nominal; ordinal; interval; ratio. These are frequently described as ‘measurement scales’, though most researchers would not necessarily recognize all of them as scales. It is important for the questionnaire writer to recognize which type of data is being collected for each question, as this will determine

Attitude measurement in the questionnaire

The measurement of attitude poses more problems than does the measurement of behaviour. Respondents are able to respond relatively easily to behavioural questions, limited only by their memory of events, the amount of effort they are prepared to give to answering the questions and the degree to which they are prepared to be truthful.

Itemized rating scales of questions in the questionnaire

Itemized rating scales are used to help the researcher obtain a measure of attitudes. The researcher first develops a number of dimensions – attitude statements, product or service attributes, image dimensions, etc. Respondents are then asked to position how they feel about each one using a defined rating scale. A rating scale is usually

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Attitudinal rating scales of questions in the questionnaire

A number of forms of rating scale have been developed specifically to address responses to a series of attitudinal dimensions. The three most commonly used are: Likert scale; semantic differential scale; Stapel scale. 1. Likert scale The Likert scale (frequently known as an ‘agree-disagree’ scale) was first published by psychologist Rensis Likert in 1932.

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