ABSTRACT
The design of a questionnaire is intimately related to the general plan of the survey. After the planning stage, some specification for a questionnaire can be drawn up, which will follow directly from the statement of the issues to be investigated and the overall design adopted for the survey. The final form of the questionnaire should be piloted as a whole, to test the sequence and the context of each question. The two different types of questions – open and closed – have different purposes and thus one kind cannot necessarily be said to be 'better' than another. There are various techniques by which both kinds of questions can be used on a single questionnaire, perhaps the most usual being the filter or funnel approach. Postal questionnaires obviously have to be constructed differently from schedules for interviewers. Postal questionnaires have also to be designed in order to maintain rapport with the respondent in the absence of an interviewer.
