Designing Effective Questionnaires: Types, Formats, and Best Practices, Slides of Research Methodology

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Developing a Questionnaire

Types of Questions

• Open-ended
  • high validity, low manipulative quality
• Closed-ended
  • low validity, high manipulative quality

Closed-ended

• A closed-ended question is one in which you

provide the response categories, and the

respondent just chooses one:

What do you like best about your job? (a) The people (b) The diversity of skills you need to do it (c) The pay and/or benefits (d) Other: ______________________________

Dichotomous Questions

• Dichotomous Question: a question that has

two possible responses

• Could be
  • Yes/No
  • True/False
  • Agree/Disagree

Interval Level

• Attempt to measure on an interval level
  • Likert response scale : ask an opinion question on a 1-to-5, 1-to-7, etc. bipolar scale - Bipolar: has a neutral point and scale ends are at opposite positions of the opinion
  • Semantic differential: an object is assessed by the respondent on a set of bipolar adjective pairs
  • Guttman scale: respondent checks each item with which they agree; constructed as cumulative, so if you agree to one, you probably agree to all of the ones above it in the list

Filter/Contingency Questions

• To determine if a respondent is ‘qualified’ to answer questions, might need a filter or contingency question (also known as knowledge) - Limit # of jumps - If only two levels, use graphic to jump - If you can't fit the response to a filter on a single page, it's probably best to be send them to a page, rather than a question #

Should there be a middle category?

• Does it make sense to offer it?
• Should not be used as the “don’t know or no

opinion” option.

• The middle option is usually placed between the positive and negative responses.
• Sometimes it’s last in an interview.

Direct Magnitude Scaling

• Method of obtaining ratio-scaled data
  • Idea is to give respondents an anchor point, and then ask them to answer questions relative to that
• Example:
  • Suppose you are interested in the severity of crimes. - Begin by assigning a number to one crime and then have respondents assign numbers to the others based upon a ratio.

Question Placement

• It's a good idea to put difficult, embarrassing or threatening questions towards the end - More likely to answer. - If they get mad and quit, at least you've gotten most of your questions asked!
• Put related questions together to avoid giving the impression of lack of meticulousness
• Watch out for questions that influence the answers to other questions.

Wording of Questions

• Direction of Statements
  • Response bias
  • Socially desirable
• Always and never
  • Avoid this
  • Better to phrase as ‘most’, ‘infrequently’
• Language
  • Reflect educational level and reading ability
  • Need for various languages

Mutually Exclusive and Exhaustive

• Mutually exclusive : not possible to select

more than one category/value

• Exhaustive : providing all possible

categories/values

Forced Choice

• Choose between 2 choices
  • Might not be relevant
  • Other choices exist (or at least possible)
  • Lesser of two evils

Response Bias

• Exaggerating the truth
• Socially desirable answers
• Consider using ‘trap’ questions
  • Possibly fictional choice

Sensitive Items

• More comfortable answering in categories
  • Minimize missing data
  • Might loose statistical power