Data Collection – Questionnaire Design

Ask a silly question and you'll get a silly answer. Trite but true. In a previous paper (TMR 3.1) we looked carefully at the means of selecting respondents from a population in order to ensure that they were representative of that population. One thing was particularly obvious – it takes time, effort and money to select an unbiased sample; yet all this investment will be squandered if one fails to design clear, relevant, meaningful and unambiguous questions for eliciting the desired information from selected respondents. This is the subject of this article. First we look at the design of questionnaires and questions, next at the issue of scaling and finally the construction of questionnaires.