Design, Evaluation, and Analysis of Questionnaires for Survey Research, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

Designing a survey involves many more decisions than most researchers realize. Survey specialists, therefore, speak of the art of designing survey questions (Payne 1951). However, this book introduces the methods and procedures that can make questionnaire design a scientific activity. This requires knowledge of the consequences of the many decisions that researchers take in survey design and how these decisions affect the quality of the questions.

It is desirable to be able to evaluate the quality of the candidate questions of the questionnaire before collecting the data. However, it is very tedious to manually evaluate each question separately on all characteristics mentioned in the scientific literature that predicts the quality of the questions. It may even be said that it is impossible to evaluate the effect of the combination of all of these characteristics. This would require special tools that did not exist so far. A computer program capable of evaluating all the questions in a questionnaire according to a number of characteristics and providing an estimate of the quality of the questions based on the coded question characteristics would be very helpful. This program could be a tool for the survey designer in determining, on the basis of the computer output, which questions in the survey require further study in order to improve the quality of the data collected.

Furthermore, after a survey is completed, it is useful to have information about the quality of the data ...