SECRETS TO DRATFING A TOP NOTCH QUESTIONNAIRE FOR RESEARCH/SURVEY PURPOSES

October 26, 2015 By Divine Nwachukwu

The importance of questionnaires in research purposes cannot be over emphasized. Questionnaires are a set of printed or written questions with a choice of answers in a given rank or order, specially devised for the purpose of a survey or a statistical study. It can also be a written set of questions that are given to people in order to collect facts or opinions about a particular topic of interest. This is chiefly a research or survey questions asked to respondents and designed to extract specific information or response.  Questionnaires basically serve four basic purposes.

  1. To collect a specific data of interest.
  2. To make the data collected to be comparable and amendable to analysis.
  3.  Minimize leading questions and bias in formulating and asking questions.
  4. To make research questions engaging and interesting.

 It is used in obtaining primary data directly from the respondents understudy.
The quality or precision of a survey hinges on the response retrieved from the respondents; this can only be achieved through a questionnaire than isn’t perceived to be “one-sided” or tilting to a particular direction. Questionnaires that are one-sided can but only retrieve one-sided answers or biased answers from respondents which can ultimately result to a lowered power or precision of the experiment, project, survey or statistical study.  For a power or precision of a survey to be as high as possible, independent and unbiased answers have to be gotten from respondents and this can only be achieved through a questionnaire that isn’t biased and cumbersome or boring.
Below are the little secrets that can help you in drafting a top notch questionnaire for your research or survey purposes.

QUESTIONNAIRE SHOULD BE BRIEF

When drafting a questionnaire, the questions have to be as brief as possible; this is to prevent respondents from getting bored which ultimately may affect their responses. Only relevant questions should be asked.

SIMPLICITY AND CLARITY

In other to get unbiased responses to the questions asked, these research questions should be as clear and as simple as possible. The more simple and clear your questions are. The questions should be simple, clear and precise. Its language should be very simple so that informants may easily understand. The more précised and effective their responses would be.

AVOID PERSONNAL QUESTIONS

In drafting a top notch questionnaire, the privacy of respondents should be strictly adhered to. Avoiding personal questions would help increase the confidence of respondents and this would help in extracting more effective responses from them.

QUESTIONS MUST FOLLOW A SEQUENCIAL ORDER

In other to make question interesting and engaging to respondents, research questions should follow a chronological or sequential order. The arrangement of the questions should be such so that no research question should slip back. It must involve a logical flow of questions.

CONFIDENTIALITY OF INFRMATION

In other to get the required information from respondents, they should be assured of their confidentiality in some questions they have reservations about. Every respondent should be assured that information given in the questionnaire by them shall be kept secret.

QUESTIONNAIRE SHOULD BE ATTRACTIVE

Proper care should be taken to make the questionnaire attractive. A well set questionnaire will certainly impress the recipient and this would greatly improve their urge to answer questions without being bored.

 

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