Designing a good questionnaire is an important requirement when conducting a research study.
However, there are several critical decisions to make when you design a reliable and valid product. Check out some of the general considerations you should keep in mind while developing a relevant questionnaire for your study:
- Check information requirements: Designing apt questions depends on the information that is required from respondents. You should check the type of information that is needed to fulfill the study objectives. Accordingly, you will be able to develop the right questions that may fetch you the required details.
- Define target respondents and ways to reach them: It is also important to define your target respondents from whom the required information has to be collected. Review some basic factors to consider while deciding about your target population. Further, you should decide on method to reach your respondents. It helps you in setting up the right questions in the right manner.
- Decide about the content and wording of questions: You should only include such content in your questions that directly or indirectly supplies information to test your study’s hypotheses. Additionally, the wording of your questions should make it easier for a respondent to answer them. It should be clear without any articulation and written in a way so that it is easier to analyze the collected data.
- Meaningfully order and format questions: Make sure to start your questions from easier and pleasant ones that do not threaten your respondents. Then, you may keep them in an increasing order of difficulty. You may additionally try to group questions related to specific aspects and to introduce variety for designing interesting questions.
- Perform a pre-test: Before you finalize your questionnaire, make sure to pre-test it so all types of mistakes can be identified and corrected before it is finally implemented on a large scale.
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