Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

262 ASKING QUESTIONS
It is best to adopt the questions used in this chapter and to
conservatively modify them to fit your needs.
2. Determine what level of precision you need for your demographic
questions. The examples in this chapter will give
most researchers more precision than they might need.
Follow the examples provided in this chapter, and adjust
them based on the level of precision your study requires.
3. Demographic questions are almost always asked at the end
of an interview, after the substantive questions. One exception
to this general rule is when they are asked at the beginning
of the survey in order to screen—for example, you might
want to screen for people over the age of fifty-five—or to
balance a particular sample, or to ask questions separately
about all household members. Questions that occur at the
end of the survey (except for questions about race and
ethnicity) can be asked in any order.
4. It is also important to note that a respondent can also be
asked about other people in the household and can serve as
an informant. This is most common with demographic questions.
In this type of question, the word you would be used
when referring to the respondent, but the name of each
person in the household would be inserted in repeated questions.
That is, a questionnaire would not ask only “When is
your birthday?” it would ask, “When is your/(NAME’s) birthday?”
For each person or “name” in the household the question
would be repeated. In this chapter, we are using an abbreviated
form for questions; in reality, the word “NAME” would be
inserted in many of the questions used in the field.
Asking About Household Size and Composition
Researchers are often interested in who lives in a household and
their relationships to one another, either for substantive reasons
or in order to have information necessary to weight the data.