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

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286 ASKING QUESTIONS<br />

and data processing personnel, and they provide important reference<br />

points when describing the findings. Main questions are usually<br />

numbered consecutively with standard Arabic numerals from 1 to n.<br />

Subparts of questions usually follow some sort of outlining procedure.<br />

Thus, a question with three parts is usually identified by A, B, C (or<br />

by a, b, c). <strong>To</strong> further identify questions as subparts, they are usually<br />

indented. Subparts of subparts are usually identified by numbers<br />

placed in parentheses [(1), (2), (3)] and are further indented.<br />

Advance Preparation for Data Processing<br />

Computer-assisted interviewing requires researchers to make data<br />

processing decisions before the study is fielded. Even with paper<br />

questionnaires, we would strongly advise you to do as much advance<br />

preparation as possible for data processing before you print<br />

the questionnaire. If you wait until the interviewing is completed<br />

and then discover there are problems in processing the results or<br />

analyzing the data, problems can be difficult to solve. Advance<br />

preparation saves substantial amounts of time and money later and,<br />

even more important, it can help eliminate questions that may not<br />

provide the kinds of data anticipated. Even experienced researchers<br />

often revise or eliminate several questions in this stage of questionnaire<br />

preparation.<br />

<strong>The</strong> major activity in advance preparation for data processing<br />

is to precode all closed-ended questions. Precoding simply involves<br />

assigning a code number to every possible answer to a closed-ended<br />

question. If there are more than ten answers (including “don’t<br />

know” and “no answer”), it is necessary to use two or sometimes<br />

three-digit precodes. If two-column precodes are used, the first nine<br />

codes are 01, 02, . . . , 09 and not 1, 2, . . . , 9. Similarly, if three-digit<br />

precodes are used, the numbers are written 001, 002, 003, and so<br />

on, not 1, 2, 3.<br />

Precoding. In precoding, provision should always be made for “no<br />

answer” and “don’t know” possibilities. <strong>The</strong>se categories need not

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