RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

QUESTIONNAIRES CONTAINING FEW VERBAL ITEMS 337
questionnaire. For this reason it is important
to commence the questionnaire with nonthreatening
questions that respondents can readily
answer. After that it might be possible to move
towards more personalized questions.
Completing a questionnaire can be seen as a
learning process in which respondents become
more at home with the task as they proceed.
Initial questions should therefore be simple, have
high interest value, and encourage participation.
This will build up the confidence and motivation
of the respondent. The middle section of
the questionnaire should contain the difficult
questions; the last few questions should be of
high interest in order to encourage respondents to
return the completed schedule.
Acommonsequenceofaquestionnaireisas
follows:
Commence with unthreatening factual questions
(that, perhaps, will give the researcher
some nominal data about the sample, e.g. age
group, sex, occupation, years in post, qualifications
etc.).
Move to closed questions (e.g. dichotomous,
multiple choice, rating scales, constant sum
questions) about given statements or questions,
eliciting responses that require opinions,
attitudes, perceptions, views.
Then move to more open-ended questions (or,
maybe, to intersperse these with more closed
questions) that seek responses on opinions,
attitudes, perceptions and views, together
with reasons for the responses given. These
responses and reasons might include sensitive
or more personal data.
The move is from objective facts to subjective
attitudes and opinions through justifications and
to sensitive, personalized data. Clearly the ordering
is neither as discrete nor as straightforward as this.
For example, an apparently innocuous question
about age might be offensive to some respondents,
aquestionaboutincomeisunlikelytogodownwell
with somebody who has just become unemployed,
and a question about religious belief might be seen
as an unwarranted intrusion into private matters.
Indeed, many questionnaires keep questions about
personal details until the very end.
The issue here is that the questionnaire designer
has to anticipate the sensitivity of the topics in
terms of the respondents, and this has a large
sociocultural dimension. What is being argued
here is that the logical ordering of a questionnaire
has to be mediated by its psychological ordering.
The instrument has to be viewed through the eyes
of the respondent as well as the designer.
In addition to the overall sequencing of
the questionnaire, Oppenheim (1992: ch. 7)
suggests that the sequence within sections of the
questionnaire is important. He indicates that the
questionnaire designer can use funnels and filters
within the question. A funnelling process moves
from the general to the specific, asking questions
about the general context or issues and then
moving toward specific points within that. A filter
is used to include and exclude certain respondents,
i.e. to decide if certain questions are relevant or
irrelevant to them, and to instruct respondents
about how to proceed (e.g. which items to jump
to or proceed to). For example, if respondents
indicate a ‘yes; or a ‘no’ to a certain question,
then this might exempt them from certain other
questions in that section or subsequently.
Questionnaires containing few verbal
items
The discussion so far has assumed that
questionnaires are entirely word-based. This
might be off-putting for many respondents,
particularly children. In these circumstances a
questionnaire might include visual information
and ask participants to respond to this (e.g.
pictures, cartoons, diagrams) or might include
some projective visual techniques (e.g. to draw
apictureordiagram,tojointworelatedpictures
with a line, to write the words or what someone
is saying or thinking in a ‘bubble’ picture), to tell
the story of a sequence of pictures together with
personal reactions to it. The issue here is that in
tailoring the format of the questionnaire to the
characteristics of the sample, a very wide embrace
might be necessary to take in non-word-based
Chapter 15