2- The role of questionnaire design in minimizing total research error

Role of questionnaire design in minimising total research error

1. Assure respondents of anonymity. This helps to improve response rates (easing non-response error) and eliminate potential threat bias. This is particularly important for surveys of subordinate groups (e.g., employ-ees, suppliers, students, etc.).

2. Avoid revealing the purpose of the research or the organization conducting the study. This works to pre-vent sponsorship bias and auspices bias. This is especially applicable to survey research conducted by polit-ical groups.

3. Design a survey that is concise, interesting, and simple to complete. This ensures higher response rates, reduces survey termination and eases uninformed response bias. Well-designed questionnaires include clear and concise instructions on how they should be completed. These must be very easy to understand, so use short sentences and basic vocabulary. One way to eliminate misinterpretation is to emphasize crucial words in each item by using bold, italics or underlining. The look of the survey is also important – use professional production methods for the questionnaire (computerized/desktop production tools).

4.Know what needs to be measured – Having a clear picture and understanding of what data needs to be collected contributes to the quality of data collection.

5. Provide a “don’t know, no opinion or not applicable” option where possible. This reduces uninformed response bias.

6. Use reverse-scaled ratings when possible. This removes bias related to psychological interpretation of rat-ings. When using a Likert or other psychometric scale, reverse-scoring will invert the numeric scale for half of the distributed surveys. This strategy allows a balanced collection of data, though introduces a greater capaci-ty for data processing error as reversed scores require normalization before analysis. A similar variant involves the restatement of questions in some surveys to the negative (e.g., changing “My workplace encourages inno-vation” to “My workplace stifles innovation”).

7. Avoid ambiguous or emotionally-charged words and phrases. This helps to eliminate subjective or reac-tionary responses (e.g., “Do you believe that hunting is an especially cruel form of murder?”).

8. Avoiding suggestions, implications or justifications in the questions. This helps to avoid subconscious in-fluence of the respondent. Leading questions are phrased in a manner that forces or encourages a specific answer or opinion from the respondent (e.g., “Research has shown that children should eat at least four serv-ings of vegetables per day. How many servings does your child eat per day?”). Biased questions can result in skewed results, so objective phrasing is encouraged.

9. Use counter-biasing statements with sensitive questions. This provides reassurance for respondents who may be embarrassed or hesitant to provide an accurate response (e.g., “Studies have shown that every year, more men are visiting professional hair salons in lieu of barber shops. Have you visited a professional hair sa-lon in the past 12 months?”). This helps to reduce bias, non-response error and/or survey termination.

10. Randomize response choice order. This helps eliminate order bias. Naturally, this does not apply to rat-ing scales and “Other” and “N/A” options should consistently appear throughout the survey at the begin-ning/end of the choices.

11.Emphasis on right word/phrase should be kept in mind – The language should be clear so that the required data can be received. This also makes the question and the requirement of survey easy to understand and thus help in getting a better response and answer.

12. Unwanted assumptions are avoided – A survey is about getting factual data and assumptions should be avoided.