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

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318 ASKING QUESTIONS<br />

in ways that seem reasonable. This may involve no more than informal,<br />

open-ended interviews with several of your respondents.<br />

Furthermore, it is even better to ask respondents to criticize a preliminary<br />

version of the questionnaire. Doing so will help you more<br />

critically determine the relevance of the questions and the extent<br />

to which you may have difficulty obtaining useful responses. For<br />

example, you might discover that respondents are likely to be offended<br />

by a certain type of question, or that a line of questions is<br />

not useful, or that a question leads to misinterpretations of the issue<br />

being examined.<br />

<strong>The</strong> order of the steps of questionnaire development is intended<br />

to minimize the costs of revisions. Obtaining peer evaluation and<br />

testing the revised questionnaire on friends and coworkers should<br />

not require out-of-pocket funds, since these steps would normally<br />

be taken by the questionnaire designer and any other project staff.<br />

We have generally found that it is always useful for questionnaire<br />

designers to play the roles of respondents and answer their own<br />

questions. Surprisingly often, persons who write questions will find<br />

that they cannot answer them as written.<br />

At both NORC and SRL, a process called the “group mind” is<br />

used. Coworkers of the questionnaire designer, who have been<br />

given a draft of the questionnaire earlier, meet in a group session to<br />

tear it apart. Although the process is always a humbling experience<br />

for the writer, it is also a rapid, efficient method of improving the<br />

questionnaire.<br />

Follow Up Pretests with a Pilot Test<br />

At this stage many of the problems will have been noted and corrected,<br />

but not all. Since the earlier evaluation has been by persons<br />

similar to the questionnaire writer, new problems may be discovered<br />

when the questionnaire is pilot-tested on respondents similar<br />

to those who will be sampled in the main study. In addition, unless<br />

the questionnaire is self-administered, this stage will require inter-

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