Questionnaire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for statistical analysis of the responses, this is not always the case. The questionnaire was invented by Sir Francis Galton.
Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of surveys in that they are cheap, do not require as much effort from the questioner as verbal or telephone surveys, and often have standardized answers that make it simple to compile data. However, such standardized answers may frustrate users. Questionnaires are also sharply limited by the fact that respondents must be able to read the questions and respond to them. Thus, for some demographic groups conducting a survey by questionnaire may not be practical.
As a type of survey, questionnaires also have many of the same problems relating to question construction and wording that exist in other types of opinion polls.
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[edit] Questionnaire construction
[edit] Question types
Usually, a questionnaire consists of a number of questions that the respondent has to answer in a set format. A distinction is made between open-ended and closed-ended questions. An open-ended question asks the respondent to formulate his own answer, whereas a closed-ended question has the respondent pick an answer from a given number of options. The response options for a closed-ended question should be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Four types of response scales for closed-ended questions are distinguished:
- Dichotomous, where the respondent has two options
- Nominal-polytomous, where the respondent has more than two unordered options
- Ordinal-polytomous, where the respondent has more than two ordered options
- (bounded)Continuous, where the respondent is presented with a continuous scale
A respondent's answer to an open-ended question is coded into a response scale afterwards.
[edit] Question sequence
In general, questions should flow logically from one to the next. To achieve the best response rates, questions should flow from the least sensitive to the most sensitive, from the factual and behavioural to the attitudinal, and from the more general to the more specific.
[edit] Types
- A Food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) is a questionnaire to assess the type of diet consumed in people, and may be used as a research instrument. Examples of usages include assessment of intake of vitamins[1] or toxins such as acrylamide.[2]
[edit] See also
- Statistical survey
- Computer-assisted personal interviewing
- Enterprise Feedback Management
- Questionnaire construction
- Structured interview
- Web-based experiments
- Quantitative marketing research
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
[edit] Further reading
- Leung, Wai-Ching, "How to design a questionnaire", in Student BMJ, (British Medical Journal, Student Edition), June 2001
[edit] References
- ^ Smedts HP, de Vries JH, Rakhshandehroo M, et al. (February 2009). "High maternal vitamin E intake by diet or supplements is associated with congenital heart defects in the offspring". BJOG 116 (3): 416–23. doi:. PMID 19187374.
- ^ Prospective Study of Dietary Acrylamide Intake and the Risk of Endometrial, Ovarian, and Breast Cancer”
[edit] External links
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Look up questionnaire in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- The Question Bank
- Harmonised questions from the UK Office for National Statistics
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
- UK Market Research Society[1]
- Hints for designing effective questionnaires - from the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation
- OmniPHP(tm) SurveyEngine - An open source advanced survey development application that allows creating any type of web-based survey, questionnaire, interview, or census.
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