Response - Research Paper Example

Research Questionnaire: Formulating Outcome Reliability Research Questionnaire: Formulating Outcome Reliability Designing a research questionnaire follows a series of revisions and validations by the author to firmly assess the strength of every question and to be certain that every questions relates to the topic being studied and would not mislead participant’s answers away from the data the researcher want to gather. The student cited steps to be able to come up a highly qualified research questionnaire and is deemed right for putting first in the list to make a clearly defined topic of the study to avoid confusion to be able to have clear participant’s responses and to be able to achieve this is through a precise and focused questionnaire (Bordens & Abbott, 2011, p.261). Formulating types of questions based on the purpose of the study is a given fact to be able to come up with an unbiased and relevant data answering to the purpose of the study.

The demographic information, though very important in correlating the responses with the participant’s character, should be placed in the later part of the questions to avoid impression of a boring questionnaire. Thus the first questionnaire question must be engaging, interesting and motivating (Bordens & Abbott, 2011, p. 267) to further lure the participant in answering the questionnaire. To help validate the reliability of the questionnaire, test-retest conduction can be helpful though not highly recommended due to the complexities of its execution (Bordens & Abbott, 2011, p. 264). It is agreed that question construction should always be relevant to the topic otherwise answers would be misleading but using a single type of questioning is better to utilize to have a sense of uniformity and flow.

Open-ended questions can be harder to summarize and analyze so partially open ended questions have the advantage of easy summarization with the participant’s privilege to put an opted answer not provided in the list of answers (Bordens & Abbott, 2011, p. 263-264). Choosing the first question is a hard task because it bears the pull of whether participants would lively answer questions all throughout or would label it boring in totality. The opted first question is a closed-ended sentence but can be made better to a question form which is better to use than an open-ended one (Infopoll, 1998, “Most,” para. 13). It can be written as, “Considering today’s economy, what is the economic effect of new Wal-mart stores in small communities?

” By posting this question participants are given the idea of what the survey is opted to determine. The choices of answers on the other hand can be better written in a logical manner, from the positive going to neutral then to the negative choices or vice versa as if written in a scale, to give participants a better flow of answers to choose from and thus avoids misleads. Providing a spectrum of options is a good characteristic that defies misleading choices (Office of Educational Assessment, 2006, p. 3). The ‘Stay the same’ and ‘no effect’ choices share the same neutral implication.

Choices in a logical manner could be written as: improved, somewhat improved, no effect, somewhat worsened, worsened. Moreover the manner of writing the question as recommended by Dillman (Bordens & Abbott, 2011, p. 263) is that the question be written in a boldface font with a normal font on the category level to give emphasis on the question. Also format of the response category should be made consistently all throughout the questionnaire; if the researcher opted to use check boxes or line before the choices then it should be consistent.

Having quality questionnaire items bears the reliability of the research outcome so it is important for researchers to get necessary information solicited by the use of the survey questionnaire. To be able to come up with reliable information from reliable participant answers, some summed up simple tips to go through before writing questions are: be relevant, be specific, avoid confusion, use appropriate scales and avoid bias (Office of Educational Assessment, 2006, p. 1-5) follow these simple steps and formulating questions would not be a question of reliability.

ReferencesBordens, K., & Abbott, B. (2011). Research design and methods. In A. Francis (Ed.), EMBA research methods (pp. 257-295). McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Infopoll (1998). How to write a good survey. Softlogic Inc. Retrieved from http://www.accesscable.net/~infopoll/tips.htm Office of the Educational Assessment (2006). Tips for writing questionnaire items. University of Washington. Retrieved from http://www.washington.edu/lst/workshops/web_tools/resources/oea.pdf.