Administering, analysing, and reporting your questionnaire

Abstract

Piloting Questionnaires tend to fail because participants don't understand them, can't complete them, get bored or offended by them, or dislike how they look. Although friends and colleagues can help check spelling, grammar, and layout, they cannot reliably predict the emotional reactions or comprehension difficulties of other groups. Whether you have constructed your own questionnaire or are using an existing instrument, always pilot it on participants who are representative of your definitive sample. You need to build in protected time for this phase and get approval from an ethics committee.3 During piloting, take detailed notes on how participants react to both the general format of your instrument and the specific questions. How long do people take to complete it? Do any questions need to be repeated or explained? How do participants indicate that they have arrived at an answer? Do they show confusion or surprise at a particular response—if so, why? Short, abrupt questions may unintentionally provoke short, abrupt answers. Piloting will provide a guide for rephrasing questions to invite a richer response (box 1). Box 1: Patient preference is preferable I worked on a sexual health study where we initially planned to present the questionnaire on a computer, since we had read people were supposedly more comfortable “talking” to a computer. Although this seemed to be the case in practices with middle class patients, we struggled to recruit in practices where participants were less familiar with computers. Their reasons for refusal were not linked to the topic of the research, but because they saw our laptops as something they might break, could make them look foolish, or would feed directly to the internet (which was inextricably linked to computers in some people's minds). We found offering a choice between completing the questionnaire on paper or the laptop computer greatly increased response rates.