Questionnaire Construction and administration

Introduction:

No survey can achieve success without a well-designed questionnaire. A questionnaire is a research tool
featuring a series of questions used to collect useful information from participants. These instruments
include either written or oral questions and comprise an interview-style format.

Questionnaires may be qualitative or quantitative and can be conducted online, by phone, on paper or face-
to-face, and questions don’t necessarily have to be administered with a researcher present.

Questionnaires feature either open or closed questions and sometimes employ a mixture of both. Open-
ended questions enable respondents to answer in their own words in as much or as little detail as they
desire. Closed questions provide respondents with a series of predetermined responses they can choose
from.

Construction of questionnaire:

There are following methods used to construct questionnaire.

Define your goals and objectives

 The first step of designing a questionnaire is determining your aims.

 What topics or experiences are you studying?
 What specifically do you want to find out?
 Is a self-report questionnaire an appropriate tool for investigating this topic?

Once you’ve specified your research aims, you can operationalize your variables of interest into
questionnaire items. Operationalizing concepts means turning them from abstract ideas into concrete
measurements. Every question needs to address a defined need and have a clear purpose.

Use questions that are suitable for your sample

Create appropriate questions by taking the perspective of your respondents. Consider their language
proficiency and available time and energy when designing your questionnaire.

Questionnaire length and question order

Once you have your questions, make sure that the length and order of your questions are appropriate for
your sample. If respondents are not being incentivized or compensated, keep your questionnaire short and
easy to answer. Otherwise, your sample may be biased with only highly motivated respondents completing
the questionnaire.
Pretest your questionnaire

When you have a complete list of questions, you’ll need to pretest it to make sure what you’re asking is
always clear and unambiguous. Pretesting helps you catch any errors or points of confusion before
performing your study.

Reliability

In terms of reliability, researchers want to ensure that questionnaires have high internal reliability.

 Internal reliability means that all questions in the questionnaire should consistently measure the
same thing (no irrelevant questions).
 Test-retest reliability is also tested before using a questionnaire. The same participants complete the
same questionnaire but on different days to do this. If a high correlation exists between the test
scores measured on different days, the researchers can assume that the constructed questionnaire has
a high test-retest reliability.

Validity

There are several types of validity, one of which is constructed validity. The questionnaire measures the
variables stated in the hypothesis and if the scores measured reflect the hypothesis. Researchers must also
ensure that the questions cover all the variables under study. If this is the case, the experiment has high
validity.

Use clear language

You should design questions with your target audience in mind. Consider their familiarity with your
questionnaire topics and language and tailor your questions to them.

For readability and clarity, avoid jargon or overly complex language. Don’t use double negatives because
they can be harder to understand.

Use balanced framing

Respondents often answer in different ways depending on the question framing. Positive frames are
interpreted as more neutral than negative frames and may encourage more socially desirable answers.

Define the target respondents

At the outset, the researcher must define the population about which he/she wishes to generalize from the
sample data to be collected. For example, in marketing research, researchers often have to decide whether
they should cover only existing users of the generic product type or whether to also include non-users.
Secondly, researchers have to draw up a sampling frame. Thirdly, in designing the questionnaire we must
take into account factors such as the age, education, etc. of the target respondents.

Keep your questions focused

Ask about only one idea at a time and avoid double-barreled questions. Double-barreled questions ask about
more than one item at a time, which can confuse respondents.

Avoid leading questions

Leading questions guide respondents towards answering in specific ways, even if that’s not how they truly
feel, by explicitly or implicitly providing them with extra information. It’s best to keep your questions short
and specific to your topic of interest.

Questionnaire administration methods:

Questionnaires can be self-administered or researcher-administered. Self-administered questionnaires are

more common because they are easy to implement and inexpensive, but researcher-administered
questionnaires allow deeper insights.

Self-administered questionnaires

Self-administered questionnaires can be delivered online or in paper-and-pen formats, in person or through

mail. All questions are standardized so that all respondents receive the same questions with identical
wording.

Self-administered questionnaires can be:

 cost-effective

 easy to administer for small and large groups

 anonymous and suitable for sensitive topics

 self-paced

But they may also be:

 unsuitable for people with limited literacy or verbal skills

 susceptible to a non-response bias (most people invited may not complete the questionnaire)

 Biased towards people who volunteer because impersonal survey requests often go ignored.
Researcher-administered questionnaires

Researcher-administered questionnaires are interviews that take place by phone, in-person, or online
between researchers and respondents.

Researcher-administered questionnaires can:

 help you ensure the respondents are representative of your target audience

 allow clarifications of ambiguous or unclear questions and answers

 have high response rates because it’s harder to refuse an interview when personal attention is given
to respondents

But researcher-administered questionnaires can be limiting in terms of resources. They are:

 costly and time-consuming to perform

 more difficult to analyze if you have qualitative responses

 likely to contain experimenter bias or demand characteristics

Closed-ended questions

Closed-ended, or restricted-choice, questions offer respondents a fixed set of choices to select from. Closed-
ended questions are best for collecting data on categorical or quantitative variables.

Categorical variables can be nominal or ordinal. Quantitative variables can be interval or ratio.
Understanding the type of variable and level of measurement means you can perform appropriate statistical
analyses for generalizable results.

Examples of closed-ended questions for different variables

Nominal variables include categories that can’t be ranked, such as race or ethnicity. This includes binary or
dichotomous categories.

Ordinal variables include categories that can be ranked. Consider how

wide or narrow a range you’ll include in your response items, and their
relevance to your respondents.
Likert-type questions collect ordinal data using rating scales with 5 or 7 points. Just like rating a dish in
restaurant out of 10

Pros and cons of closed-ended questions

Well-designed closed-ended questions are easy to understand and can be answered quickly. However, you
might still miss important answers that are relevant to respondents. An incomplete set of response items may
force some respondents to pick the closest alternative to their true answer. These types of questions may also
miss out on valuable detail.

To solve these problems, you can make questions partially closed-ended, and include an open-ended option
where respondents can fill in their own answer.

Open-ended questions

Open-ended, or long-form, questions allow respondents to give answers in their own words. Because there
are no restrictions on their choices, respondents can answer in ways that researchers may not have otherwise
considered. For example, respondents may want to answer “multiracial” for the question on race rather than
selecting from a restricted list.

Advantages of Questionnaires

Some of the many benefits of using questionnaires as a research tool include:

 Practicality: Questionnaires enable researchers to strategically manage their target audience,

questions and format while gathering large data quantities on any subject.

 Cost-efficiency:You don’t need to hire surveyors to deliver your survey questions — instead, you
can place them on your website or email them to respondents at little to no cost.

 Speed: You can gather survey results quickly and effortlessly using mobile tools, obtaining
responses and insights in 24 hours or less.

 Comparability: Researchers can use the same questionnaire yearly and compare and contrast
research results to gain valuable insights and minimize translation errors.
  Scalability: Questionnaires are highly scalable, allowing researchers to distribute them to
demographics anywhere across the globe.

 Standardization: You can standardize your questionnaire with as many questions as you want about
any topic.

 Respondent comfort:When taking a questionnaire, respondents are completely anonymous and not
subject to stressful time constraints, helping them feel relaxed and encouraging them to provide
truthful responses.

 Easy analysis: Questionnaires often have built-in tools that automate analyses, making it fast and
easy to interpret your results.

Disadvantages of Questionnaires

Questionnaires also have their disadvantages, such as:

 Answer dishonesty: Respondents may not always be completely truthful with their answers — some
may have hidden agendas, while others may answer how they think society would deem most
acceptable.

 Question skipping: Make sure to require answers for all your survey questions. Otherwise, you may
run the risk of respondents leaving questions unanswered.

 Interpretation difficulties: If a question isn’t straightforward enough, respondents may struggle to

interpret it accurately. That’s why it’s important to state questions clearly and concisely, with
explanations when necessary.

 Survey fatigue: Respondents may experience survey fatigue if they receive too many surveys or a
questionnaire is too long.

 Analysis challenges: Though closed questions are easy to analyze, open questions require a human
to review and interpret them. Try limiting open-ended questions in your survey to gain more
quantifiable data you can evaluate and utilize more quickly.

 Unconscientiously responses: If respondents don’t read your questions thoroughly or completely,

they may offer inaccurate answers that can impact data validity. You can minimize this risk by
making questions as short and simple as possible.