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COLLECTING QUANTITATIVE DATA
We have deliberately designed an example of a bad questionnaire, to demonstrate to you clearly where improvements can be made to improve the quality of a questionnaire. We provide analysis to show you exactly what can be improved on, as well as an improved version of the questionnaire. The subject is exploring the relationship between alcohol consumption and academic performance, investigating current trends within a sample of students drawn from a large city-based University.
A noted in Chapter 11, designing and developing a successful questionnaire is a time-consuming process.
The design should always be influenced by your research questions and what it is you are trying to find out. Making sure you are really clear about this before you start designing the questionnaire is important, as otherwise you get stuck!
To begin, the purpose of each and every question should be well-defined and well understood in terms of the data that it will produce and what that data is likely to be used for. So, rather than just thinking about the question, also ask yourself what the answers might be, this helps to ensure that the questions are good. Furthermore, you also need to think about what you will do with that resulting data, that is, how you will analyse it. This all helps with the design of questions.
We have deliberately designed an example of a bad questionnaire, to demonstrate to you clearly where improvements can be made to improve the quality of a questionnaire. The subject is exploring the relationship between alcohol consumption and academic performance, investigating current trends within a sample of students drawn from a large city-based University.
More specifically, the objectives are to explore:
- Current trends with respect to alcohol consumption
- Variations in alcohol consumption across faculties and levels of programme
- The impact of alcohol consumption on academic practice
- Variations in gender and any other related demographic characteristics
Finding your Way: It is very easy to design a ‘bad questionnaire’ if insufficient attention is given to what the questions actually mean. Piloting a questionnaire will help to see any problems.
To help you better understand what makes a bad questionnaire (including identifying the key problems with it in the analysis provided), we also provide a better version of the same questionnaire to help you see how it can be improved:
Chapter 11: Collecting Quantitative Data
Example of a Bad Questionnaire