Survey Questions, Using the Questionnaire at all Levels

Use the Questionnaire to ask the Right Questions

Whenever you are conducting a research most will feel tempted to use a questionnaire as a data collection tool for subsequently reporting.. Thats really were data collection should begin because a questionnaire can be a very usefull tool to collect data, at the same time it can be a very poor ally. Why is it that sometimes Research fails and subsequently failure on reporting? Well it all begins with the kind of data you are collecting in research which in turn begins with the kind of questionnaire you are using in research which in turn begins with the kind of questions you are asking. In short, you may create a fantastic super questionnaire for your research but if you are asking the wrong kind of questions and expecting the right kind of answers, then rethink your whole research methodology quickly friend. Lets understand what a questionnaire is shall we?

Questionnaire Definition, Make it work for reporting

The questionnaire must be the tool you use to ask questions and find the right answer....that's as easy as it gets when it comes to the questionnaire definition. You see people, don't complicate things. Many times you find researchers invest a lot of their valuable time developing a bulky questionnaire that is so bulky you wonder whether most of it is relevant. The challenge these days is that some researchers want to be reporting about even the most irrelevent things and at the end of the day you have no clue how to draw a conclusion. There is need to make sure you are asking the right questions, but how do you do that?

1. Read your Research Proposal; Assuming you wrote an award winning research proposal, read it again and understand the problem statement, the objectives and any other important things you may want to measure. Get into your Research Proposal so deep that you have mastered every piece of it so that at the end of the day you wont need to refer to the Research Proposal everywhere you go. In short, get to fully understand your mission.

2. Brainstorm; Keep thinking deeply about your ideas and make sure to put them together the right way. Some questions you may do well to ask yourself if you want to collect the right question and subsequently report well are 1) What exactly am I trying to measure????? 2) Why am I measuring it and why should this research matter to anybody? 3) How am I going to measure this? When you reach to the how stage then it is evident to start creating the right kind of questions.

3. Seek help through others; You don't necessarily have to always go to a researchers office and ask him to look at your work but you can make use of other researchers work that have been done related to your topic. Do not at all costs plagiarize anybodies work but make it your goal to just see how others have approached things. Usually at the back of the research report, you might be fortunate to find the kind of questionnaire they used when collecting the data they wanted.

 Reporting your Valuable Findings to a Valuable Audience.

When reporting your findings, always make sure to have your audience in mind. At the end of the day your goal is to communicate your research findings in a research friendly way. It is absolutely no use to load your audience with so much information that at the end of the day they dont seem to understand anything. When reporting your findings, make sure its done significantly only then would you have done a successful research. See YA!!