QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN

-Anushka Kashyap(BA0190008)

Questionnaire is often used in surveys and experiments in the form of open-end and closed-end
questions. Some of the well-known texts about questionnaires are Oppenheim, De Vaus, and
Foddy which gives references about how to design questions and layouts and also covers detailed
attitude measuring.

Measures need to be taken for an appropriate questionnaire-

(i) Good idea of what to expect. You need to know properly about the questions you are
asking and also the way of asking questions. For this, you can go for case study,
interviews, and ethnography.
(ii) For questionnaire most commonly written questions are used. You need literate
respondents to participate so that they could read and understand the questions. In
countries like India, where the percentage of illiterate respondents is pretty well,
researchers need to read and write questions for them. It takes a lot of time.
(iii) Researchers are most interested in counts, frequencies, percentages, etc.
(iv) If you design your questionnaire properly then you can generalize from those to a
more general population.

Procedures to design a questionnaire-

(i) Think about what you want to find so that you design your questions in a way that
captures what you need to know.
(ii) Select your questions style depending upon the questions aim.
(iii) Designing the question- Depending again on research aims, you need to design your
question. It involves word your questions unambiguously.
(iv) Structuring the questionnaire- this refers to ways of laying out the questions such as
what section to include etc.
(v) Piloting the question- it is a crucial stage. Word piloting is used in questionnaires to
mean the testing out.
 (vi) Revising the questionnaire- we need to revise the questions, because we can’t afford
any mistakes. If you have done any mistakes, you have to cope with it. It means in the
case of offline questionnaire lots of copies are printed and you can’t change it.
(vii) Administering the questionnaire.

Information expected to obtained from questionnaire-

(i) Facts and Knowledge- This includes biographical questions about people’s age,
gender, work and, so on.
(ii) Actions- information related to their activities like when they did it etc.
(iii) Opinions/beliefs- you may get information about the ideas and beliefs of respondents
about any topic or activity.
(iv) Attitudes- attitudes are supposed to be things that underline our opinions. We often
need tools namely attitude scale to measure it.
(v) Motives- information related to motives of respondents behind doing any activity.
Much more difficult because people don’t prefer to pin down their real motives.
(vi) Past Behaviour- it contains both regular and memorable activities. People usually
don’t remember their day to day activities so there is a possibility of misinformation
but in case of memorable activities, they are high possibility of getting true
information.
(vii) Likely future behaviour- what respondents are more likely to do in the future. But it is
a very uncertain area.

As we are going down in the list of information, we are getting more and more away from true
and factual answers. Information on top is more reliable.

Things that should be kept in mind while designing questionnaire-

(i) Design questionnaire in a way that it captures information that you want to find out.
(ii) Make sure that answers to questions serve the aim of your questionnaire.
(iii) Proper Presentation of finding from the answers to the questions- If you want
numerical results, you can prefer closed questions. And if you want expletory answers
then you can go for open questions.
(iv) Design scale very carefully to measure numerical scores and percentages.
Open question- It invites participants to write an answer for getting information. Literate
respondents can read and write questions on their own and for illiterate ones we have to read and
write it out. For example, to know about the measures of government eliminating gender
inequality. It invites different ideas and opinions from people. In this you get enormous variety
of answers. It represents the respondent’s opinion more clearly. It gives respondents an open
platform to put their ideas and less open to researcher bias.

Closed question- Respondents get a set of options to answer the question and you have to pick
one or more options among all. Easy to score and analyze. Coding of closed questions is simple.
It gives you predictable outcome because respondents choose answers that are set by researchers.
Easy to get numerical that is very useful for statistical illustrations and summaries.

Need for piloting questionnaire-

(i) To expose your questionnaire to new forms of thinking and understanding rather than
restricting it to researchers understanding because people may think differently.
(ii) Evaluating the quality of answers provided by the questionnaire. It requires attention
that your answers are serving aim of your questionnaire or not.
(iii) To assess and revise the phrasing and content of questions- to make sure, wordings
and other aspects of questions are unambiguous and clear to respondents.
(iv) To explore issues of questionnaire structure and sequence.

You can use piloting to check variation and meaning of answers. Make sure that there shouldn’t
be repetition of questions so that respondents fed up with questions and start giving Acquiescent
response. Maintain proper scale to measure things properly. Also, maintain the flow and timing
of questionnaires.