Questionnaire Design

This topic cover questionnaire design and measurement issues.

Read First

Do start with a careful review of existing survey instruments that cover similar topics. Don't reinvent the wheel -- working from a high-quality, previously-piloted survey instrument will save time and improve the quality of your final output.

Guidelines

Questionnaire design process

When designing a survey instrument from scratch, follow these steps:

1. Review (or draft) a Theory of Change and Pre-Analysis Plan.
2. Make a list of all intermediary and final outcomes of interest, as well as important covariates and sources of heterogeneity
3. Prepare an outline of questionnaire modules, based on the above list. Get feedback from research team.
4. For each module, prepare a list of specific indicators to measure. Get feedback from research team and implementing partners.
5. Review existing questionnaires and compile databank of relevant questions for each module
6. Draft questionnaire, noting source of each question (e.g. source: Uganda National Panel Survey (LSMS 2013-14), source: Uganda DHS 2011, source: Uganda Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment Programme 2013, Evaluation Follow-Up Survey [1], source: own design - extra attention required in pilot), and get feedback from research team and implementing partners
7. Survey Pilot: Content-based Pilot
8. Questionnaire Translation
9. Questionnaire Programming

Designing a follow-up questionnaire is simpler. Try to keep as close to the baseline survey instrument as possible, to facilitate panel analysis. Better to add/subtract questions than to modify existing ones.

Literature Review for Survey Instrument

Review existing surveys to understand how others have measured the key indicators you are interested in.

Informed Consent

The Institutional Review Board that granted approval for the study typically provides a template for requesting Informed Consent.

Basic Rules for Questionnaire Design

• All questions should have pre-coded answer options. Answer options must be:
  • Clear, simple, and mutually exclusive
  • Exhaustive (tested and refined during the Survey Pilot)
  • Include 'other' (but if >5% of respondents choose 'other', answer choices were insufficiently exhaustive)

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This article is part of the topic Questionnaire Design

Additional Resources

Blogs related to questionnaire design

• Reasons not to do a list experiment: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/23/thinking-list-experiment-heres-list-reasons-think/

Comprehensive resources on survey design

• Margaret Grosh and Paul Glewwe. 2000. Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from 15 Years of the Living Standards Measurement Study. Volumes 1, 2, and 3. The World Bank.[2]
• Dhar, Diva. Instrument Design 101 [Powerpoint Slides]. Retried from https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/documents/Instrument%20Design_Diva_final.pdf