Questionnaires

A questionnaire is a written set of questions used to gather people's views. Many questionnaires use tick boxes with a set of possible answers, so everyone answers the same questions in the same way.

Why questionnaires are useful

Writing a questionnaire is cheap and simple: you create the questions once and print as many copies as you need. Because every person reads identical wording, the answers slot together neatly and are easy to compare. Closed tick-box questions give quantitative data, which is quick to count and turn into charts.

Paper questionnaires reach people who are not online, such as older members of a community. And because they can be anonymous, people may answer sensitive questions more honestly than they would face to face.

For example, a youth theatre group planning its next season could hand a one-page questionnaire to the audience at the interval, asking which night of the week suits them best and how they travel to the venue. The tick boxes take seconds to complete and the results can be totalled straight after the show.

Drawbacks to plan for

Printing and distributing paper copies takes time and money, and someone must tally each form and key the answers in, which is slow with hundreds of responses. Response rates can be low — many people ignore a form handed to them — so the results may only reflect the keenest few.

People fill in a questionnaire alone, so if a question is unclear they cannot ask for help and may guess or skip it.

Closed questions limit answers to the boxes you offered, so you may miss a reason you never thought of; open questions let people write freely but give qualitative answers that are slow to read and hard to compare. A questionnaire is not automatically quantitative: it depends on the questions you ask.

Carrying one out

1. Write short, clear questions.
2. Distribute the questionnaire, on paper or online.
3. Collect the completed forms.
4. Count or enter the answers so they can be analysed.