Using Questionnaires
Questionnaires gather the responses of a number of people to a fixed set of questions. Professional researchers carefully design their questions and randomly select representative people to respond in order to reach reliable answers. Because your survey will not be that extensive, avoid generalizing about your findings. It’s one thing to say that “many of the students” who filled out a questionnaire hadn’t read a newspaper in the past month; it’s another to claim that this is true of 72 percent of the students at your school — especially when your questionnaires went only to those at the gym on Friday, and most of them just threw out the forms.
A more reliable way to treat questionnaires is as group interviews: assume that you collect typical views, use them to build your overall knowledge, and cull the responses for compelling details or quotations. Use a questionnaire to concentrate on what a group thinks as a whole or when an interview to cover all your questions is impractical. (See Figure 32.7 for a sample questionnaire.)
TIPS FOR USING A QUESTIONNAIRE
- Ask yourself what you want to discover with your questionnaire. Then thoughtfully invent questions to fulfill that purpose.
- State your questions clearly, and supply simple directions for easy responses. Test your questionnaire on classmates or friends before you distribute it to the group you want to study.
- Ask questions that call for checking options, marking yes or no, circling a number on a five-point scale, or writing a few words so responses are easy to tally. Try to ask for one piece of information per question.
- If you wish to consider differences based on age, gender, or other variables, include some demographic questions.
- Write unbiased questions that solicit factual responses. Do not ask, “How religious are you?” Instead ask, “What is your religious affiliation?” and “How often do you attend religious services?” Then you could report actual numbers and draw logical inferences about respondents.
- When appropriate, ask open-ended questions that call for short written responses. Although qualitative responses are more difficult to tally than quantitative, the answers may supply worthwhile quotations or suggest important issues or factors.
- Try to distribute questionnaires at a set location or event, and collect them as they are completed. If necessary, have them returned to your campus mailbox or another secure location. The more immediate and convenient the return, the higher your return rate is likely to be.
- Use a blank questionnaire or make an answer grid to mark and add up the answers for each question. Total the responses so you can report that a certain percentage selected a specific answer.
- For fill-in or short answers, type each answer into a computer file. (Code each questionnaire with a number, and note it if you might want to return to the individual questionnaire.) You can rearrange the answers in the file, looking for logical groups, categories, or patterns that accurately reflect the responses and enrich your analysis.
