Questionaire Desgin - Essay Example

Running Head: Questionnaire Design Questionnaire Design Academia Academia Research The questionnaire design is the second most important step in any research after the problem definition, simply because if the questionnaire would not be prepared in relation to the information what is desired for a successful research then the entire project can go waste and also the results obtained would be full of errors and inaccurate, one cannot take judgments or decisions on wrong analysis. So questionnaire is a structured technique for collection of data, which consists of a series of questions that the respondents have to answer.

It is the job of the designer to assure whether the questions are sequenced or not, having simple wording or not, and many more things that would be discussed later.There is a complete process in questionnaire design, over which the questions to be asked are decided, the steps are: specifying the information needed, specifying the type of interviewing methods, determining the content of individual questions, designing the questions to overcome the respondents inability and unwillingness to answer, deciding upon the question structure, determining the question wordings, arranging the questions in a proper order, identifying the form and layout, reproducing the questionnaire and last as the pretesting of the questionnaire.

Regarding the question's design, there are few important points need to be focused upon, as a poor design can provide a poor data. There are many types of questions such as unstructured questions that are need to be answered in own words of the respondents, they should be as minimum as possible as the respondent's time is also important and people also hesitate to provide personal information. There are structured questions as well such as multiple choice, which should be used the most, dichotomous questions, which are having only two answers "yes" and "no" or even "don't know", they also should be used frequently to save respondents time and making it easier for the respondent to answer.

Scaling questions are also used but they take a lot of respondent's time in thinking and can make the respondent feel about changing in views frequently, which can provide inaccurate data. The use of unambiguous words should be avoided as if the respondent would not understand the question, he/she can provide inaccurate data, also avoid biasing questions that can give the respondent a clue of what answer is required and again the results would be inaccurate, double barreled questions should be avoided as well, which means that only one issue should be addresses in the question, more than one issue can confuse the respondent.

About the choices in the questionnaire, the only thing that should be kept in mind is that they should make it simple for the respondent to answer, for example a question that is asking a respondent to mention the color of shirt he/she had worn a week ago can be extremely irritating, same as a question having 10 various types of responses to be ticked in a scaling sequence, it is a good option to put the answers of the question in pairs, such as once a week, twice a week, more than twice a week etc.

The sequence of questions should be prepared keeping in view its tendency to keep the interest of the respondent, the attempt should be made to have as much of important information collected at an early stage as possible or if following a sequence then it is better to bring a complete analysis of what problems respondent is facing and what can lead to its settlement through the research purpose, so that respondent can also be delighted to provide the useful information that would also be useful to him/her in future.

BibliographyMalhotra N.K., "Marketing Research", (n.p): Pearson, 2004.