Introduction/Overview

This course is aimed at giving participants a thorough grounding in questionnaire design. This course will be highly participatory, with sessions aimed at providing hands-on experience of designing questionnaires and survey questions, for quantitative social research.

Course objectives

By the end of the course participants should:

• Have a greater awareness of the different aspects involved in writing good survey questions and questionnaires
• Be able to design questions that:
  • meet research objectives,
  • take analysis considerations into account,
  • take account of primacy and recency effects,
  • avoid ambiguous words or concepts,
  • avoid writing multiple questions in one,
  • minimise problems of recall error and telescoping.
• Have the tools to critique existing surveys

Topics

The course covers:

• Questionnaire and measurement error
• Concepts to indicators
• General principles of question design
• Designing response options
• Writing questionnaires for different modes
• Reviewing survey questions
• Your questions and questionnaire design challenges

Who will benefit

A general familiarity with quantitative research methods is assumed, but it is not necessary to have experience of using these methods. You will find this course useful if:

• you are new to survey research
• you need to design survey questionnaires for the first time
• you commission or manage survey research in central or local government, health or other applied policy sectors and need to understand the issues associated with questionnaire design.

Learning outcomes

Participants will have a good awareness of the optimal ways to word individual questions and create the questionnaire as a whole.

Course tutor

This course is brought to you by NatCen Learning, part of the National Centre for Social Research: Britain’s leading centre for independent social research.

The largest independent not-for-profit social research organisation, NatCen’s customers include key policy decision-makers, government, think tanks, charities, businesses, universities and other research organisations.

NatCen Learning courses are led by experienced trainers and subject matter experts who work within the National Centre for Social Research. Every course is specially designed to encourage the effective transfer of theory to practice through encouraging participatory contribution.

Course fee payable to SRA.

  This course contributes 6 hours to the MRS CPD programme