RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

336 QUESTIONNAIRES
property of the school or staffs’ and students’ own
computers; on average or exactly in school today
Have you had a French lesson this week
What constitutes a ‘week’: the start of the school
week (i.e. from Monday to a Friday), since last
Sunday (or Saturday, depending on one’s religion)
or, if the question were put on a Wednesday, since
last Wednesday; how representative of all weeks
is this week – there being public examinations in
the school for some of the week
How old are you
15–20
20–30
30–40
40–50
50–60
The categories are not discrete; will an old-looking
40 year old flatter himself and put himself in the
30–40 category, or will an immature 20-year old
seek the maturity of being put into the 20–30
category The rule in questionnaire design is to
avoid any overlap of categories.
Vocational education is available only to the lower
ability students but it should be open to every student.
This is, in fact, a double question. What does the
respondent do who agrees with the first part of
the sentence -‘vocational education is available
only to the lower ability students’ – but disagrees
with the latter part of the sentence, or vice versa
The rule in questionnaire design is to ask only one
question at a time.
Although it is impossible to legislate for
the respondents’ interpretation of wording, the
researcher, of course, has to adopt a commonsense
approach to this, recognizing the inherent
ambiguity but nevertheless still feeling that it is
possible to live with this indeterminacy.
An ideal questionnaire possesses the same
properties as a good law, being clear, unambiguous
and practicable, reducing potential errors in
participants and data analysts, being motivating
for participants and ensuring as far as possible that
respondents are telling the truth (Davidson 1970).
The golden rule is to keep questions as short
and as simple as possible.
Sequencing the questions
To some extent the order of questions in a schedule
is a function of the target sample (e.g. how they
will react to certain questions), the purposes of the
questionnaire (e.g. to gather facts or opinions),
the sensitivity of the research (e.g. how personal
and potentially disturbing the issues are that will
be addressed), and the overall balance of the
questionnaire (e.g. where best to place sensitive
questions in relation to less threatening questions,
and how many of each to include).
The ordering of the questionnaire is important,
for early questions may set the tone or the mindset
of the respondent to later questions. For
example, a questionnaire that makes a respondent
irritated or angry early on is unlikely to have
managed to enable that respondent’s irritation or
anger to subside by the end of the questionnaire.
As Oppenheim (1992: 121) remarks, one covert
purpose of each question is to ensure that the
respondent will continue to cooperate.
Further, a respondent might ‘read the signs’
in the questionnaire, seeking similarities and
resonances between statements so that responses
to early statements will affect responses to later
statements and vice versa. While multiple items
may act as a cross-check, this very process might
be irritating for some respondents.
Krosnick and Alwin (1987) found a ‘primacy
effect’ (discussed earlier), i.e. respondents tend to
choose items that appear earlier in a list rather than
items that appear later in a list. This is particularly
important for branching instructions, where the
instruction, because it appears at the bottom of the
list, could easily be overlooked. Krosnick (1999)
also found that the more difficult a question
is, the greater is the likelihood of ‘satisficing’,
i.e. choosing the first reasonable response option
in a list, rather than working through a list
methodically to find the most appropriate response
category.
The key principle, perhaps, is to avoid creating
a mood-set or a mind-set early on in the