Questionnaires Wjec-Eduqas Foundation

Questionnaires

What is a questionnaire?

• A questionnaire is a set of questions

• A questionnaire can be used to collect data

• The questions can be open or closed

  • Open questions require written answers

  • Closed questions usually requires a selection between options

What does a good question look like?

• A good question is clear and is not ambiguous

  • e.g. “Have you revised recently?” is ambiguous as it is not clear what is classed as recent

  • Instead you could ask “How many days has it been since you last revised?”

• The question is not personal

  • Do not ask for someone’s name if it is not needed

• The question gives a time frame if necessary

  • e.g. “How many times do you visit the gym in one week?”

• The question is not leading

  • e.g. “Do you agree that my cooking is great?”

How do I write the options for a question?

• The options should be exhaustive

  • You can include an option for “Other”

  • You can include an option for “Over 5 hours” or “Less than 20%”

• The options could be grouped

  • Instead of asking for a person to state their age, you could give them age ranges to choose from

• The options should not overlap

  • e.g. “2 to 4” and “4 to 5” overlap

    • Which option would someone choose if their answer is 4?

• Avoid inequalities as they could cause confusion to the participants of the questionnaire

  • You could ask for the closest answer

    • e.g. “To the nearest hour, how long did you sleep last night?”

  • You could use descriptive words to describe inequalities

    • e.g. “At least 4 metres but less than 6 metres”

How do I make results fair?

• Make sure you ask a random selection of people

  • Do not only ask one group of people who might give the same answer

• Make sure you ask enough people

  • There is no exact number as it depends on the situation

  • If there are 1000 students in a school and you only ask 10 then that is only 1%