Questionnaire design is a multistage process that requires attention to many details at once. Designing the questionnaire is complicated because surveys can ask about topics in varying degrees of detail, questions can be asked in different ways, and questions asked earlier in a survey may influence how people respond to later questions. Researchers also are often interested in measuring change over time and therefore must be attentive to how opinions or behaviors have been measured in prior surveys.
These include the following nine elements:
- Determination of goals, objectives, and research questions
- Definition of key concepts
- Generation of hypotheses and proposed relationships
- Choice of survey mode (mail, telephone, face-to-face, Internet)
- Question construction
- Sampling
- Questionnaire administration and data collection
- Data summarization and analysis
- Conclusions and communication of results.
