Designing a Questionnaire
What is a questionnaire?
- it's
a set of specially designed questions to which answers are written
on a pre-prepared form.
- it tells
you who your audience might be in demographic and psychographic terms
- it tells
you certain things about your audience's behaviour and lifestyle
- it's
a way of finding out exactly what your audience know and need to know
about your topic
- it contains
up-to-date data which is not available from any other source
- it helps
in the construction of a text and in generating advertising to fund
that text
Before
you start designing your questionnaire think very carefully about what
information you need from whom. Your questionnaire is a tool to help
you get that data. A poor quality questionnaire will yield poor quality
data.
Points to consider when designing a questionnaire
- Questionnaires
should be clearly laid out and easy to read
- Keep
it short (no more than 2 sides of paper)
- Use
multiple choice or yes/no answers to make it easier to analyse the
data
- Start
off with easier questions (age, occupation etc) and finish with the
ones that have to be thought about a little more - give your interviewee
the chance to warm up and focus on the topic
- Each
question should ask for only one piece of information
- Don't restrict your questions to those with "Yes/No" answers - you need a lot more information than that!
Handing out your questionnaire
You will get a broader range of respondents if you put your questionnaire online. You can use Survey Monkey or try this technique using Google Docs.
- BE NICE
AND POLITE - anyone who responds to your questionnaire is doing you
a major favour.
- Statistically,
the larger the number of respondents, the more useful the data. You
need to get AT LEAST 30 completed questionnaires to work from - this
may mean handing out 60 or even 90.
- Make
it easy for your respondents - either email it to them or hand them a printout and a pen.
- Try
to get as broad a range as possible of respondents - pick a wide age
and status range.
- Don't
forget the possibility of doing an online questionnaire, if you can
lure enough genuine respondents to the site.
Analysing
& Presenting Your Data
You need
to learn from the results of your questionnaire. Therefore you will
need to spend some time logging the answers. Then you need to create
tables for each result - it's up to you how to do this. The easiest
way is to log the answers in Microsoft Excel, then you can produce pie
eg:
Q:If there
was a big fight, which of these movie heroes would win?
Think hand-to-hand combat and don't make allowances for cool weaponry.
That's a different poll question.
The results
of your questionnaire, plus a blank copy of your questionnaire form
must be handed in as part of your pre-production work.
Further Reading
