A Practical Guide to Survey Questionnaire Design and Evaluation

A Practical Guide to Survey Questionnaire Design and Evaluation summarizes practical principles, guidelines, and best practices for developing and testing survey questionnaires driven and supported by theoretical and empirical research. It provides a broad overview of literature on questionnaire design, drawing on both theoretical and empirical research.

The book consists of three parts. The first covers the survey response process model, which will serve as the theoretical framework to establish the basic principles of writing different types of survey questions (attitudinal, behavioral, demographic and knowledge). The second part of the book will focuses on special topics such as sensitive questions, developing questionnaires for children, designing a paper survey, designing a web survey and optimizing for a mobile device, developing questionnaires for a multimode survey, and conducting surveys in multiple languages and cultures. The third part of the book will focus on methods for testing and evaluating survey questions. Topics will cover focus groups, cognitive laboratory testing, expert review, Questionnaire Appraisal System, behavior coding, respondent and interviewer debriefing, experimental pretest, and pilot studies. Given extensive web survey coverage, we will also discuss usability testing of web surveys. Suggestions for further reading, case studies and discussion questions are included in all chapters.

This book will be of interest to those using survey methodology / questionnaires and graduate courses incorporating survey design modules across the social and behavioural sciences and others, including psychology, communication studies, nursing and healthcare research, sociology, anthropology and education amongst others.