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

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GLOSSARY 351<br />

context of questionnaire A general term referring to the totality<br />

of cues provided that can influence response. <strong>The</strong>se cues may<br />

include the announced subject of the study, any instructions provided<br />

to the respondent or interviewer, and the questions themselves.<br />

Also included would be interviewer behaviors caused by the<br />

questionnaire’s context (such as nervousness at asking sensitive<br />

questions). <strong>The</strong>se cues have a particularly strong influence on responses<br />

to attitude questions, but they may also influence responses<br />

to behavior questions.<br />

continuation sheets (or supplement) Loose sheets included to<br />

obtain information when the number of items, persons, or events<br />

varies from household to household. Continuation sheets reduce<br />

the size of the main questionnaire, but they increase the complexity<br />

of locating the proper form and also increase the possibility that<br />

some loose sheets may be lost.<br />

data archives As used in survey research, a library of information<br />

stored from previous surveys, primarily in machine-readable form.<br />

Information includes question wordings as well as responses, so that<br />

archival information is useful in designing new questionnaires as<br />

well as in secondary analysis of existing data.<br />

debriefing A meeting of interviewers, supervisors, and research<br />

analysts held after the fieldwork or pretest of a study is completed.<br />

<strong>The</strong> purposes of a debriefing are to alert the analyst to possible difficulties<br />

respondents had in understanding or answering questions,<br />

as well as to improve future questionnaires and field methods.<br />

deck (or worksheet or file) When responses to a questionnaire<br />

need to be recorded on more than one worksheet, they must be<br />

numbered so that the analysts will know which worksheet goes with<br />

which questions. This numbering is usually done by calling each<br />

worksheet or file by a “deck” number. Thus, for one respondent,<br />

there would be one or more decks of information. <strong>The</strong> deck and<br />

column number would provide each item’s location. For example,

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