GG3 Assignment: Designing a questionnaire

• Questionnaires are a set of pre-planned questions to which answers are written on a specially prepared form.
• Questionnaires are one of the most widely used primary data sources in human geography because the information obtained is up-to-date and often not obtainable from any other source.
• Poorly planned questionnaires yield poor quality data.

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In your write up, you should include the following sections A, B and C.

A. A statement of Aims

It is important to have read the background information in the course booklets and on the two villages before starting to decide what you want to investigate. It is not a good idea to gather information using a questionnaire without knowing what you want to use it for.

• What is your investigation about? There are a number of issues you might want to investigate, concerning rural transport, tourism or commuting. There may background information you would want to collect first (eg from the tourist board, the Census or bus timetables). The more clearly focussed your questions are, the more likely the questionnaire is to succeed. State clearly what the issue(s) you are investigating are. This may be completely different for each student.
• Who do you want to quiz? Do you want to ask local residents, or are you more interested in questioning visitors.

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B. The questionnaire

A copy of your questionnaire along with some explanation of why you chose these questions.

• Questionnaires should be clearly laid out and easy to read - ideally designed ‘on screen’ to be easily run off and photocopied.
• Keep it short (one side of A4) and use ‘tick boxes’ where possible (it is more difficult to analyse the results if the questions are open ended).
• Put the straight-forward questions at the beginning and the probing ones near the end (this puts people at ease and gets you more truthful answers).
• Don’t get too personal or people won’t want to do the questionnaire (eg age or income; you can usually guess broad age bands such as over 60 or under 20 and its usually better to ask for occupation).

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C. Method

How would you carry out the questionnaire?

• Are you going to sample every tenth household or would you try to go to every one? Do you aim to have the same number of questionnaires from each village? If aimed at tourists, are you going to stand at car parks/bus stops or near attractions?
• How would you decide where the village begins and ends (eg would you include neighbouring farms and isolated dwellings)?
• When would you do the survey? Choose daytime in the week and many residents will be away working and tourist numbers could be low. Time of year crucial for tourists (more families during school holidays, higher numbers on bank holiday weekends).
• What problems do you anticipate in collecting your data?

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