Questionnaire Design

Questionnaire design is the process of designing the format and questions in the survey instrument that will be used to collect data about a particular phenomenon. In designing a questionnaire, all the various stages of survey design and implementation should be considered. These include the following nine elements: (1) determination of goals, objectives, and research questions; (2) definition of key concepts; (3) generation of hypotheses and proposed relationships; (4) choice of survey mode (mail, telephone, face-to-face, Internet); (5) question construction; (6) sampling; (7) questionnaire administration and data collection; (8) data summarization and analysis; (9) conclusions and communication of results.

One goal of the questionnaire design process is to reduce the total amount of measurement error in a questionnaire. Survey measurement error results from two sources: variance ...