Creating a survey questionnaire is one of the most essential steps in developing a survey. The questions must be clear and concise, and should be focused on the issue that the researcher wants to study.
A survey questionnaire is a tool used to collect information from the group of representatives of a target population, or simply, the sample. It is important to identify and clarify the questions to be included in the questionnaire to be able to ask only the queries that need to be asked and avoid any misleading or unnecessary questions.
The first step in constructing survey questions is putting your survey goal on the limelight and listing initial or draft questions that emerge from the goal or purpose of the survey. Each question should directly relate to the goal of the survey.
Based on the survey goal, ask yourself what you want to measure from the responses of the participants. These attributes include the respondents’ demographics, knowledge, skills, attitude, perceptions, behaviour, intentions, beliefs and goals. In writing the questions, you may measure more than one attribute, for instance, the knowledge and skills of nursing students in performing CPR.
Before you begin writing the questions, you must first learn the types of questions used in a survey questionnaire. The two basic types of questions are the closed-ended and the open-ended questions. Each of these two has sub-types that you should consider before constructing the questions.
The type of response options follow the type of questions you are to use in writing the questionnaire. For instance, a closed-ended, dichotomous type of questions means that the response options you should use are only “Yes” and “No”, or “Excellent” and “Poor”, or any two-point response scales.
Reliability is an important measure on the consistency of the survey results that are gathered by using the questionnaire. It simply answers the question, “Do the respondents truly understand the meaning of the questions as they are stated?”. The most commonly used reliability test for survey questions is the test and re-test method that serves as the pilot survey.
Oskar Blakstad (Jan 2, 2012). Constructing Survey Questions. Hentet Sep 22, 2023 fra Assistert Selvhjelp - Få bedre psykisk helse via internett: https://staging.explorable.com/constructing-survey-questions