Questionnaire Design and Analysing Results
Working through the questionnaire results today for my research dissertation for my MSc in research methods for educational technology with The Open University. I find the replies really interesting and some key themes beginning to emerge.
The questionnaire was designed for the young people completing them with a fun and colour style and making use of images.
To make the questionnaire applicable to young people, the questionnaire was designed to present each question in a variety of ways to discover young people’s perceptions and opinions. The questionnaire contained both closed and open questions. Open questions were used to elicit young people’s views of the positive and negatives features of online learning. Closed questions were asked, in order, to describe the data set, for example age and gender, so that some analysis could be carried out on this basis.
Open questions such as ‘how do you use technology as part of your online learning?’ were included to provide a richer dataset and open up new themes to explore. Open questions allowed the young people to answer in their own words, which provided relevant themes to be identified.
A questionnaire also provided flexibility for the Online Tutors to distribute the questionnaires piecemeal and gather responses in a standardised way, so questionnaires are more objective. Hard copies of the information sheets, consent forms and copies of the questionnaires were provided to the Online Tutors to distribute to the young people and Parents / Guardians, complete with stamped addressed envelopes for the consent forms and completed questionnaires to be returned directly to the Researcher.
On a downside, the questionnaire limits the range and scope of questioning. The researcher was unable to probe young people further on the answers they provided but did foresee this as a weakness and addressed this potential problem through the inclusion of free-text questions to allow for some detail in the young people’s answers to be provided.