ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the different uses that questionnaires can be put to, their limitations and advantages and how to write good questions and develop, structure, test and administer a questionnaire. Written surveys and questionnaires allow one to explore how people behave in certain situations, but they can also find out a lot about their beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and their social characteristics. Some variables are suited to use in written surveys than others. Many morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic variables are easy to represent in writing and quite suited to use in a questionnaire if they are not affected by strong, overt social evaluation. Variation at the phonemic level can often be represented in conventional orthography, so mergers of phonemes can be studied relatively well with a questionnaire. Questionnaires are a great resource; however, we must be aware of their limitations. If the questionnaire was designed well, preparing the data for quantitative analysis will also be efficient.
