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…carrying on from yesterday’s post… THE DIFFICULT JOB of converting the rough questions to ones which a respondent can answer must now be tackled. Simple and clear language should always be used. It must not be assumed, for example, that the respondent understands the meaning of words like salient or infrastructure. Ambiguities must be avoided like the plague. Words like frequent, good and useful need qualifying. Questions should be precise and yet easy for the respondent to answer. Ease of response can be achieved by precoding, so that only a tick is required by way of answer. This use of multiple choices speeds the completion of the questionnaire and is useful in demonstrating to the respondent that an answer between broad limits is perfectly acceptable. The question “What are your company’s purchases of steel?” may eventually end up as: Please indicate with a tick in the appropriate boxes, your establishment’s purchases of low and high carbon steel in the year 2000:
If an effort is made to judge the type of answer which might result from a question, pitfalls will be avoided. A question which simply asks “What do you think of Dormer as a supplier of twist drills?” may generate a vague response such as “very good”. The researcher will be left wondering why they are considered very good. It is far better to pin the respondent down by providing a scale and introducing other companies as benchmarks. Hence the question becomes: Rate the following suppliers for their speed of delivery, reliability of delivery, length of life and value for money, where: 5 – Excellent 4 – Good 3 – Neutral 2 – Poor 1 – Unacceptable If you have no experience of a supplier, please score 6.
Speed of Delivery Reliability of Delivery Length of Life Value for Money In postal questionnaires, precoded questions are nearly always preferable. They make completion easier for the respondent and facilitate analysis. The final part of this article will be published on Tuesday 20th February. This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under Market Research, Quantitative Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave a Reply |
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