Questionnaire design

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. 

Course 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 

The course covers: 

• 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.