So as part of most people's university life, they will, inevitably, at some point in their course, end up needing to compose a questionnaire. Now, as someone who has been there and tries to help other people get the necessary responses to their questionnaires, I know it's not a trivial task.
Questionnaires are actually really difficult to do right; whenever someone posts on one of the many forums I frequent to get responses I usually try and spend the couple of minutes to fill it in. The first issue I sometimes hit is when it takes more than a few minutes to fill in. I don't mind spending perhaps up to 5 or 10 minutes of my oh so precious life to help someone's research, but I've seen some which literally take between 30-45 minutes to complete fully. I'm sorry, but that's just too much. You can't reasonably expect people to give decent quality answers as well as getting the quantity of respondents you need to make an analysis that actually has any statistical relevance. People need to realise that they can't always get all the answers to all their questions in one go.
When I finally actually look at the questions I am usually disappointed with a few things. The first one tends to be that the author hasn't really thought about what sort of information they want to capture. Sometimes it seems that they're doing a questionnaire because it's written in the assessment rather than actually having clearly defined what they want to find out.
The next thing that usually leads me to make all sorts of painful faces is the possible answers the author has given me to express my opinion. I had one questionnaire that continually changed whether "strongly agree" was on the left or right. Apparently this was to make sure people properly read the question and answer, but the obvious flaw was that if they hadn't read it properly they would have all sorts of unintended answers.
The next bit that annoys me is when I am given say three answers to a question, none of which I agree with and there isn't a other or N/A option. This is further made frustrating when it's made a mandatory field so I have to click something. I just find this infuriating and I usually won't actually submit the form if this is the case. Why people can't just add a free text field I don't know. Perhaps they find it annoying to have qualitative data rather than just quantitative data as it complicates their analysis?
This all leads me to think that universities should really spend more time making students think about how to create a questionnaire and especially make sure the results they are getting are going to actually be useful to what ever work they are submitting.
Questionnaires are actually really difficult to do right; whenever someone posts on one of the many forums I frequent to get responses I usually try and spend the couple of minutes to fill it in. The first issue I sometimes hit is when it takes more than a few minutes to fill in. I don't mind spending perhaps up to 5 or 10 minutes of my oh so precious life to help someone's research, but I've seen some which literally take between 30-45 minutes to complete fully. I'm sorry, but that's just too much. You can't reasonably expect people to give decent quality answers as well as getting the quantity of respondents you need to make an analysis that actually has any statistical relevance. People need to realise that they can't always get all the answers to all their questions in one go.
When I finally actually look at the questions I am usually disappointed with a few things. The first one tends to be that the author hasn't really thought about what sort of information they want to capture. Sometimes it seems that they're doing a questionnaire because it's written in the assessment rather than actually having clearly defined what they want to find out.
The next thing that usually leads me to make all sorts of painful faces is the possible answers the author has given me to express my opinion. I had one questionnaire that continually changed whether "strongly agree" was on the left or right. Apparently this was to make sure people properly read the question and answer, but the obvious flaw was that if they hadn't read it properly they would have all sorts of unintended answers.
The next bit that annoys me is when I am given say three answers to a question, none of which I agree with and there isn't a other or N/A option. This is further made frustrating when it's made a mandatory field so I have to click something. I just find this infuriating and I usually won't actually submit the form if this is the case. Why people can't just add a free text field I don't know. Perhaps they find it annoying to have qualitative data rather than just quantitative data as it complicates their analysis?
This all leads me to think that universities should really spend more time making students think about how to create a questionnaire and especially make sure the results they are getting are going to actually be useful to what ever work they are submitting.
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