A questionnaire: Are you now or in the future writing one?
If you haven’t filled in a questionnaire before you must live under a rock. If you haven’t ever constructed a questionnaire before please proceed with caution. Questionnaires are of course valid research instruments but the have their own ethical considerations and logistical problems. Poorly constructed questionnaires are frustrating to the participants who have agreed to contribute their time and data to you. They also run the risk of being useless and derailing your project. The keys to successful questionnaires are intense thought, sustained pretesting and respect for your participants. (Also, lets not call them subjects anymore).
A question of ethics
Informed consent. Bottom line this is the most respectful way of engaging participants with your research. Informed consent means exactly that. Participants know exactly what the research is about, why they are relevant to the study, what will happen to their data and how their anonymity will be protected. This means that you should be explicit about the themes and goals of your questionnaire and your project in general. They should have a fair idea of kinds of information you are collecting before consenting.
In many parts of academia researchers often rely on a naive population who are only given a vague idea of what the study is actually seeking to discover. They are drawing on the respect that many people have for the academic community. It seems like they are manipulation the community’s assumption that all academics are equally ethical and have their consultants’ interests at heart. We, inside the academy, have all heard of instances when this is not the case. Also be aware of what information potential participants can find out about you. True story: people Google names on information sheets and find out what your research interests are.
Always give an out and an in
Remember that in most research contexts consultants are under no obligation to give you any information. You must allow participants the room to refuse to answer or skip a question, or worst case scenario, completely withdraw. No cajoling or scowling. Just straight up move on. No suggestions of ‘off the record’ answers either And do not ask for explanations for non-completion.
Get Prof Partout’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Your engagement with your participants’ contributions begins at data collection. But your engagement with your consultants should not end there. You should be offering them some kind of summary of the research at the end of the project. And this should be in the form that they can understand, devoid of disciplinary jargon.
Pretest the questionnaire. Again. And again.
Everybody pretests. Sure. But not everybody takes the pretest seriously. It is not just about making sure that the questions are grammatically correct and that the questions are unambiguous. Of course those things are important. It is also a time to consider the length of a questionnaire and the order of its components. And again, the clarity of any instructions. If you are interviewing, you need to practice your own role and your own responses to the answers given to you. Adn you need to know whether you can are any good at building rapport.
Pretesting should involve ‘guinea pigs’ who match the demographics of your target populations. They should not be friends, family and fellow researchers who want you to do well in your studies. They need to be people not invested in the outcomes of your project so that they not give you the responses you dream of hearing from the real participants.
If you need an impartial ‘guinea pig’ let Prof P know!
Originally published at https://profpartout.com on March 3, 2023.
