When I started reading more about research methods, the interviews and focus groups seemed the most relevant to my research. Then when I read about the questionnaires it made me think they could provide me with some material that could help me design the interviews.
I think using a questionnaire would let me see what my colleagues think about our teaching and what ideas they have for the improvements, before meeting them for the next part of the research.
Some reading on questionnaires I have done for this project (and how it affected my questionnaire design process):
- Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.
It is a quite in-depth chapter on questionnaires that was helpful to me, especially when talking about using open questions “which allow the respondent to answer the question in their own way.” (p. 202).
I am thinking of using a questionnaire to collect qualitative data and from what I have read it looks like open questions will be suitable to use in my questionnaire.
The following was a great help when I was designing my questionnaire:
Thinking about your research topic and designing a questionnaire to gather data:
- What do you want to know?
- Who will be able to answer the questions?
- Will they understand the questions?
- How will they answer the questions?
- Will they be able to give the answers they want to give?” (p.206)
Ad.1 What do my colleagues think about our teaching? Are we doing well? Are we doing enough? What and how could we improve? What teaching methods and sessions work well? What is their experience of teaching Information Skills/Literacy?
Ad.2 and 3. I will be working with librarians from my team. They are all very well placed to understand and answer my questions.
Ad.4 I plan to have a few open-ended questions and use MS Forms to create an online questionnaire.
Ad.5 I will make sure my questionnaire to be anonymous and I will not know who said what. I think that this should free my participants to say what they really want to say. The last question will be for them to add anything they think they did not have a chance to say when replying to the previous questions.
This chapter has also provided a useful checklist. I underlined the points that were most useful to me:
- INTRAC, Simister, N., Lunin, L. (2017) Surveys and questionnaires. Available at: https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Surveys-and-questionnaires.pdf (Accessed: Jan 10, 2024).
This is a very concise document that I started with when searching for information about questionnaires. It helped me to understand well the difference between an open and closed questions and ways of structuring them, by providing good examples:
Additionally, it taught me that the questionnaires can be used:
- At any time within a project or programme cycle
- To supply baseline information
- To support ongoing decision-making
- To assess what has changed (after the project ends).
The first three points are very relevant to my project and confirmed that my decision of using questionnaires to help me with the further part of the data collection can be justified.
- Peterson, R.A. (2000) Constructing effective questionnaires. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Pp. 45-60
I focused my reading on the Constructing and Wording Questions chapter.
As with the many other readings that I have done for this part of my project, this book provides lots of information on questionnaires used in quantitative research and treats the subject in a very detailed way. For this project I am going to use a very short questionnaire, just to touch the base with my team, so what I read was very informative, but only a few paragraphs were very useful to me.
I found some helpful material here for construction of my questionnaire. For example the following quotes:
“Five useful and easy-to-apply criteria are that questions be brief, relevant, unambiguous, specific, and objective.” (p. 50)
“Constructing effective questions is a delicate endeavor [.] (…) The formulation of a question will always influence if, and how, it is answered. In many instances, there is no correct or unequivocal way to ask a question, although positively worded questions generally tend to be less confusing than negatively worded questions.” (p.59)