TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 6 introduced interviews as the most versatile and widely used method of primary data collection. The device used by interviewers for delivering questions to respondents and recording their answers is a questionnaire. This chapter considers the use, design and content of questionnaires. Questionnaires are also used in telephone research and, without interviewers, in postal or self-completion research. They are also used in online research. These questionnaires may or may not be supported by interviewers, depending on the approach. Some guidelines for questionnaire construction are given, but in large-scale quantitative survey research questionnaires are usually written by research specialists and a framework for vetting questionnaires is suggested at the end of this chapter.
Questionnaires have four main purposes in the data collection process: to collect relevant data, to make data comparable, to minimize bias and to motivate the respondent.
Since data collection is structured by the questionnaire it is a most important element in the research process. The quality of the data gathered is highly dependent on the design of the questionnaire and the questions it contains. A poorly designed questionnaire will collect inappropriate or inaccurate data and so negate the whole purpose of the research, even though the major costs will have been incurred. No amount of good analysis can retrieve bad data. The first stage in designing a questionnaire is to clarify its objectives. The Definition of research required , discussed in Section 5.4, would form the basis for this.
