RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

AVOIDING PITFALLS IN QUESTION WRITING 335
Avoid irritating questions or instructions. For
example:
Have you ever attended an in-service course of
any kind during your entire teaching career
If you are over forty, and have never attended an
in-service course, put one tick in the box marked
NEVER and another in the box marked OLD.
Avoid questions that use negatives and
double negatives (Oppenheim 1992: 128). For
example:
Or:
How strongly do you feel that no teacher should
enrol on the in-service, award-bearing course who
has not completed at least two years’ full-time
teaching
Do you feel that without a parent/teacher
association teachers are unable to express their
views to parents clearly
In this case, if you feel that a parent/teacher
association is essential for teachers to express
their views, do you vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ The
hesitancy involved in reaching such a decision,
and the possible required re-reading of the
question could cause the respondent simply
to leave it blank and move on to the
next question. The problem is the double
negative, ‘without’ and ‘unable’, which creates
confusion.
Avoid too many open-ended questions
on self-completion questionnaires. Because
self-completion questionnaires cannot probe
respondents to find out just what they
mean by particular responses, open-ended
questions are a less satisfactory way of eliciting
information. (This caution does not hold in the
interview situation, however.) Open-ended
questions, moreover, are too demanding of
most respondents’ time. Nothing can be more
off-putting than the following format:
Use pages 5, 6 and 7 respectively to respond to
each of the questions about your attitudes to inservice
courses in general and your beliefs about
their value in the professional life of the serving
teacher.
Avoid extremes in rating scales, e.g. ‘never’,
‘always’, ‘totally’, ‘not at all’ unless there
is a good reason to include them. Most
respondents are reluctant to use such
extreme categories (Anderson and Arsenault
2001: 174).
Avoid pressuring/biasing by association, for
example: ‘Do you agree with your headteacher
that boys are more troublesome than girls’.
In this case the reference to the headteacher
should simply be excised.
Avoid statements with which people tend
either to disagree or agree (i.e. that have
built-in skewedness (the ‘base-rate’ problem,
in which natural biases in the population affect
the sample results).
Finally, avoid ambiguous questions or questions
that could be interpreted differently from
the way that is intended. The problem of
ambiguity in words is intractable; at best
it can be minimized rather than eliminated
altogether. The most innocent of questions
is replete with ambiguity (Youngman 1984:
158–9; Morrison 1993: 71–2). Take the following
examples:
Does your child regularly do homework
What does ‘regularly’ mean – once a day; once a
year; once a term; once a week
How many students are there in the school
What does this mean: on roll; on roll but absent;
marked as present but out of school on a field trip;
at this precise moment or this week (there being a
difference in attendance between a Monday and a
Friday), or between the first term of an academic
year and the last term of the academic year for
secondary school students as some of them will
have left school to go into employment and others
will be at home revising for examinations or have
completed them
How many computers do you have in school
What does this mean: present but broken;
including those out of school being repaired; the
Chapter 15