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 A4)
  • 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

Handing out your questionnaire

  • 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.
  • Make it easy for your respondents - supply them with 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 charts or graphs to show the results of each question.

eg:

Q:If there was a big fight, which of these movie heroes of the summer 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

 

 

 

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