The description of the data gathering instruments, such as questionnaires, interview schedules, tests, inventories, etc., should be adequately detailed to provide the source of the instrument, any special characteristics (including its validity and reliability), any special restrictions or limitations, and its most appropriate use. Standardized instruments usually have established validity and reliability either from a history of use or from actual tests, while researcher-designed instruments usually do not have established validity and reliability. They may need to be validated by a panel of experts and should be pilot-tested where possible.
Questionnaire Design
When one looks at a completed questionnaire or the results of a valid study, he or she is often tempted to say, “That’s not difficult to do”, but that temptation quickly passes after a few minutes of closer analysis. That’s about all it takes to realize that designing a good question and good questionnaire requires more thought and time than one might originally think. There are an almost infinite variety of things to think about and to do correctly to avoid the kinds of errors that can make scores of hours of work worthless. A good questionnaire is one which helps directly achieve the research objectives, provides complete and accurate information; is easy for both interviewers and respondents to complete, is so designed as to make sound analysis and interpretation possible and is brief. Hence, questionnaire design is more of an art than a science. There are nine steps involved in the development of a questionnaire.
1. Decide the information required
It should be noted that the first step is to decide “what are the things one needs to know from the respondent in order to meet the survey’s objectives?” These should appear in the research brief and the research proposal. One may already have an idea about the kind of information to be collected, but additional help can be obtained from secondary data, so to speak, the researcher should be aware of what work has been done on the same or similar problems in the past, what factors have not yet been examined, and how the present survey questionnaire can build on what has already been discovered.