Questionnaire design

This two day 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.

Course outline
Course content covers:

• the purpose of surveys and questionnaires, identifying the key decisions researchers have to make
• how to design questionnaires
• design issues for self-completion questionnaires (paper and web-based)
• question wording and communication with respondents
• general principles of questionnaire design
• measuring behaviour
• designing questionnaires for children and young people.

Who is it aimed at?
This is an intermediate level course. A general familiarity with quantitative research methods is assumed, but it is not necessary to have experience of using these methods.

• 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.

• design questions
  
  • that meet research objectives
  • taking analysis considerations into account
  • taking account of primacy and recency effects
  • which avoid ambiguous words or concepts
  • which avoid writing multiple questions as one question
  • to minimise problems of recall error and telescoping
• design a questionnaire taking into account
  • the effects of question order and questionnaire flow
  • the needs of both coder and interviewer
• design self-completion questionnaires that make it clear to respondents how to complete the form
• design questionnaires for children and young people that are cognitively appropriate.