Critique of a Questionnaire for Research Paper

This article provides a critique of a questionnaire for a research paper. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the questionnaire and suggests areas for improvement. The questionnaire was well developed and organized, but lacked incentives and had some design flaws. The article references Burns et al. (2014) and Krosnick (2018) for guidance on questionnaire design.

SURVEY CRITIQUE
Questionnaire Critique
A questionnaire stands at the core of a good research paper. According to the
questionnaire presented, it is clear that the questions were well developed. The
formulation of the questions in the survey was simple to stimulate desired stimuli among
the responders without any confusion. As noted by Burns et al., (2014), the wording
used is grammatically correct, simple and straightforward to cater for diversity in
learning abilities of students
. Further, the questionnaire identifies the institutions that would utilize the
responses of the survey; which are Western Sydney University and Campus Living
Villages. However, the survey document omitted the inclusion of contacts to allow the
responders to make any inquiries regarding the questionnaire. Similarly, the introductory
part of the questionnaire did not indicate to the responders on how they got selected to
participate in the research to be responders. However, the questionnaire succinctly
indicated the purpose of the research which was to examine the student satisfaction
with different facilities and student’s overall wellbeing (Burns et al., 2014).
Moreover, a good questionnaire design demands that the responders are offered
an incentive to motivate them to respond. According to Krosnick (2018), to increase the
participation of the responders and reduce anxiety, there is a need to include incentives.
The two major incentives that were omitted from this survey at the introductory part are
anonymity and confidentiality of the responders. The assurance would allow the
responders to feel free while answering the questions without any bias. Confidentiality
also improves the reliability and credibility of a questionnaire as responders would tend
to be very open and honest while responding to the questions.
Consequently, the questionnaire was well organized into different sections. The
flow of the questions is such that the responders have an easy time tackling each
section with minimum effort. Moreover, the sections are divided such that data on the
demographics is well collected, as well as the information about student satisfaction
with the facilities and their wellbeing. These sections provide adequate information to
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SURVEY CRITIQUE
enable the collection of data on students’ perceptions concerning the facilities and
wellbeing. The warm-up questions used also created a favorable environment that
motivated the students to commit to answer the questionnaire fully (Krosnick, 2018).
Even though most of the questions got developed well the oval boxes for
responses would have been designed in a better way. It should be noted that
questionnaires are often analyzed based on the responses given by the responders. It
can be easier to indicate the appropriate values associated with each oval box to be
marked. For instance, the researchers would have labeled them as strongly agree,
agree, disagree, strongly disagree. On this note, the questions would have been framed
to look like, “What is your experience about the management’s attitude towards
students?”. This would have been a better question as opposed to the leading question
used in the questionnaire (Burns et al., 2014). It is inappropriate to use leading
questions in questionnaire. Some of the areas that need change in the survey are
expansion of the introduction, formulation of questions, and incentives.
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References
Burns, A.C., Bush, R.F, and Veeck, A., 2014. Marketing research. Pearson, Australia.
Krosnick, J.A., 2018. Questionnaire design. In The Palgrave handbook of survey
research (pp. 439-455). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
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