A
questionnaire is a
researchResearch can be defined to be search for knowledge or any systematic investigation to establish facts. The primary purpose for applied research is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of...
instrument consisting of a series of
questionA question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression. This information is provided with an answer....
s and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for
statisticalStatistics is a branch of mathematics concerned with collecting and interpreting data. According to other definitions, it is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Statisticians improve the quality of data with the...
analysis of the responses, this is not always the case. The questionnaire was invented by
Sir Francis GaltonSir Francis Galton FRS , cousin of Sir Douglas Galton, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced...
.
Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of
surveysStatistical surveys are used to collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research. A survey may focus on opinions or factual information depending...
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.
A
questionnaire is a
researchResearch can be defined to be search for knowledge or any systematic investigation to establish facts. The primary purpose for applied research is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of...
instrument consisting of a series of
questionA question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression. This information is provided with an answer....
s and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for
statisticalStatistics is a branch of mathematics concerned with collecting and interpreting data. According to other definitions, it is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Statisticians improve the quality of data with the...
analysis of the responses, this is not always the case. The questionnaire was invented by
Sir Francis GaltonSir Francis Galton FRS , cousin of Sir Douglas Galton, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced...
.
Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of
surveysStatistical surveys are used to collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research. A survey may focus on opinions or factual information depending...
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 pollAn opinion poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals....
s.
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.
Question sequence
In general, questions should flow logically from one to the next. To achieve the best
response rateResponse rate in survey research refers to the ratio of number of people who answered the survey divided by the number of people in the sample...
s, 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.
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 or toxins such as acrylamide
Acrylamide is a chemical compound with the chemical formula C3H5NO. Its IUPAC name is 2-propenamide. It is a white odourless crystalline solid, soluble in water, ethanol, ether and chloroform. Acrylamide is incompatible with acids, bases, oxidizing agents, iron and iron salts...
.
See also
- Statistical survey
Statistical surveys are used to collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research. A survey may focus on opinions or factual information depending...
- Computer-assisted personal interviewing
- Enterprise Feedback Management
Enterprise feedback management is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization...
- Questionnaire construction
A questionnaire is a series of questions asked to individuals to obtain statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires become a vital instrument by which statements can be made about specific groups or people or entire...
- Structured interview
A structured interview is a quantitative research method commonly employed in survey research. The aim of this approach is to ensure that each interviewee is presented with exactly the same questions in the same order...
- Web-based experiments
A Web-based experiment is an experiment that is conducted over the Internet. Psychology and Linguistics are probably the disciplines that have used these experiments most widely, although a range of other disciplines use web-based experiments...
- Quantitative marketing research
Quantitative marketing research is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing. It has roots in both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive process in which both the buyer and seller reach a satisfying...
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System is a United States national health survey that looks at behavioral risk factors. It is run by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and conducted by the individual states...
Further reading
- Leung, Wai-Ching, "How to design a questionnaire", in Student BMJ
Student BMJ is a monthly, international medical journal for medical students and junior doctors. It builds the entry to the world of medicine and comes from the BMJ Group, which publishes the highly prestigious BMJ and over 30 other sub-speciality journals.On 21st April the new website was born,...
, (British Medical JournalBMJ is a partially open access medical journal. It is among the most influential and widely read peer-reviewed general academic journals in the field of medicine in the world....
, Student Edition), June 2001
External links