Health Needs Assessment Toolkit

Designing a Questionnaire
To encourage participants to respond and provide you with the information
you want a questionnaire should be:
Attractive to look at
Brief
Easy to understand
Reasonably quick to complete
Do not ask too many questions. Decide how many questions you need to ask
rather than want to ask. Use appropriate language for the group you are
targeting. Be clear about the information you need.
The questions you are going to be compiling will be for semi-structured
interviews or a focus group.
You want as much information as possible so you need to ask open
questions. Ask for opinions:
why they think that is the case
who is it a problem for
what do they think could be done about it
what have people done to try and address the problem
how many people does it affect
how important is it
what experience do they have of the problem or can they tell you about
someone who has.
Try and develop a questionnaire similar to the one used as the second
questionnaire in the pilot study. Develop a better one and share your skill !
The questions for a focus group need to be designed to build to the key
questions and then end the discussion with the most important issues being
identified.
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