Course

Questionnaire design - Online

This live online course explores how this highly participatory course provides a thorough grounding in questionnaire design
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Questionnaire design
  • Event time:
    1st March 2023 09:30 GMT Standard Time – 13:30 GMT Standard Time
  • Format:
    online

This live online course explores how this highly participatory course provides a thorough grounding in questionnaire design. 

* Price:  £165 for SRA members, £220 for non-members.  It runs over two mornings and uses Zoom software *

Introduction/overview

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.

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

  • 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.

n.b. This course runs over two consecutive mornings:

Part 1 - 1 March 2023 - 9.30 am to 1.30 pm

Part 2 - 2 March 2023 - 9.30 am to 1.30 pm

 

Speakers

  • Jo d’Ardenne
    Research Director NatCen
    Jo d’Ardenne is a Research Director at NatCen, specialising in Survey Methods. She is the head of NatCen’s Questionnaire Development and Testing (QDT) Hub. Jo regularly provides consultancy on questionnaire design issues to a wide range of government, academic and public sector organisations. She has experience of designing questions for multiple audiences including the general public, parents, children and young people and cross-national surveys. Jo has experience in using different methodologies to evaluate survey questionnaires. She has experience in conducting desk-based reviews, expert panels, cognitive interviews, user-testing and eye-tracking research. She is a co-author of Cognitive Interviewing Practice, a text book about cognitive interviewing published by Sage.
  • Lisa Rutherford
    Research Director
    View full profile

    Lisa Rutherford is a Research Director for the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen). She has been with ScotCen for eight years and, in that period, has worked on a variety of surveys including the Scottish Social Attitudes survey and the British Social Attitudes survey. 

    She's been heavily involved in the development and testing of questions on all of the surveys she's been involved with. Lisa has a particular interest in how information relating to mental health and well-being are captured through quantitative surveys.