Questionnaire design Event
- Time:
- 09:30 - 16:30
- Date:
- 27 - 28 March 2014
- Venue:
- London Knowledge Lab 23-29 Emerald Street London WC1N 3QS The room is on the ground floor and participants will need to ring the bell to get in to the building.
For more information regarding this event, please telephone CASS Courses in Applied Social Surveys programme enquiries on +44 (0)23 8059 5376 or email cass@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
This course is about how to write effective survey questions and combine them into a meaningful questionnaire.
It focuses on the design of questionnaires used in quantitative survey research, combining suggestions from the research literature on questionnaire design with a very practical approach. It covers the general principles of questionnaire design, special issues faced in writing factual, non-factual and sensitive questions, for both interview and self-completion modes, and an introduction to the various methods to test questionnaires. NB Constructing multi-item scales based on psychometric principles is not covered by this course.
Course Objectives:
- To raise participants' awareness of the pitfalls, issues, and tradeoffs involved in writing a good question and questionnaire
- To enable participants to critique existing survey questions and questionnaires
- To provide participants with the knowledge to be able to create their own high quality survey questions and questionnaires
Course Content:
This course focuses on the design of questionnaires used in survey research, exploring the theoretical issues that arise in their development, application and interpretation as well as the practical aspects of questionnaire design that are often not taught in formal courses. It involves lectures as well as a variety of hands on workshops.
The emphasis is on the selection of appropriate measurement techniques for assessing both factual and non-factual material using survey questions. Topics include
- general principles of question design (including pitfalls to avoid, and cognitive and linguistic guidelines) and getting started with a new questionnaire,
- techniques for measuring the occurrence of past behaviours and events,
- the effects of question wording, response formats, and question sequence on attitudinal questions and well as for the measures of other subjective states,
- an appendix on how to ask about sensitive and personal information,
- how to combine individual questions into a meaningful questionnaire,
- special guidelines for self-completion surveys (postal and web) versus interview surveys, and
- an introduction to the various methods to test questionnaires.
Note there is an 'open surgery' session at the end of Day 1 where participants can get feedback on their own questionnaires.
Please note that this course does not cover the design of multi-item scales based on psychometric principles.
Target Audience:
The course is aimed at anyone wishing to improve their survey questionnaires. This course is useful for both people new to questionnaire design and those who have experience and would like to extend their knowledge. It will be a benefit not only for people who anticipate designing a questionnaire in the future, but also for those in the role of critiquing commissioned or existing research.
Duration:
This is a two day course. On the first day the course begins with registration and coffee from 9.30am and formal teaching begins at 10.00am and ends at 5.00pm. On the second day, the course runs from 9.30am and ends at 4.30pm.
Find out more about Fees, teaching and reading lists
London Knowledge Lab
23-29 Emerald Street London WC1N 3QS Tel: +44(0)20 7763 2137 Email: enquiries@lkl.ac.uk
Find out moreLinks to external websites
The University cannot accept responsibility for external websites.
Speaker information
Dr. Pamela Campanelli,independent Survey Methods Consultant, Chartered Statistician and Chartered Scientist,with a background in psychology, survey methodology and statistics.