Questionnaire Design

Coals, Objectives, and Hypotheses

The process of designing a questionnaire begins with a definition of the goals and objectives of the study. A clearly defined purpose acts as an anchor that sets the stage for questionnaire format and question construction or ordering. In what concepts and phenomena is the researcher interested? What does he or she want to learn? To what population are the results to generalize? These are all questions that should be asked during the initial phase of questionnaire design. Each item included in the questionnaire should meet the criteria that it will provide useful information related to the goals and research questions of the survey; parsimony is a virtue in questionnaire design. To properly define goals and research questions, key concepts of interest need to be detailed. A list of concepts of interest and how they relate to one another aids in selecting specific questions to include. These concepts are transformed into (i.e. operationalize as) survey questions that measure the concept in some way, proceeding from abstract concepts to specifie measurements. Once the goals and objectives of the survey have been established, it is possible to generate specifie research questions and, possibly, directional hypotheses based on theory and previous findings. The items used in the questionnaire should produce data that are appropriate to the desired analyses.

Questionnaire Format

The layout of a questionnaire, no matter what type, should reduce the cognitive burden of respondents (and interviewers) and contain an intuitive and logical flow. For example, in most cases, questions on related topics should be grouped together and questions should maintain the chronology of events. Questionnaire format should be as easy as possible to understand and use for the interviewer or the respondent depending on the mode of administration. Questions should be numbered individually, clearly spaced, and visually distinct from one another. It is especially important that self-administered questionnaires provide clear and concise instructions and have a simple layout (e.g. common question format, visual instructions for skipping questions). For interviewer-administered questionnaires, instructions that are to be read aloud to respondents should be visually distinct from instructions that are for only the interviewer; for example, set off by italics, CAPS, bold type, or parentheses ( ). Ideally, important questions should appear early in a questionnaire to avoid the possible negative effects of respondent fatigue on motivation, recall, and item nonresponse.

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