9. Questionnaire Design for Survey Research

Questionnaire design in itself is a methodology as well as a technique for assessing a variety of organizational and social system processes through individual-level perceptions. Assessing people calls for in-depth understanding of mental- and behavioral-level processes. Mapping personal attributes through MBTI, Personal Orientation Inventory (POI), Big Five Personality Scale, and also FIRO-B all required rigorous longitudinal design, and such questionnaire-based procedures that may take years before the inventory are finally used for assessment or predictive purposes. On the other hand, there are a variety of questionnaires on Leadership, Societal, and Community Analysis, Cultural Assessment Surveys of Organization, QWL Indices, and Job Satisfaction Surveys which followed steps suggested by psychometric experts, yet it is an easy way out requiring lesser amount of time, effort, and material resources to define and validate the latter sets of questionnaires for a given purpose. This chapter explained several steps involved in questionnaire design for survey-based researches, starting with operational definition of a domain of a study to more sophisticated measureable dimensions for which statements or semantic categories can be created for rating purposes. Thus, from operational definitions as to what are measurable, the intended questionnaire design is expected to evolve a first rudimentary form of the questionnaire with sizable number of items (statements) that are prepared tentatively. As a next logical step, there is a need to establish item validities (from simple assessment of items in terms of means and SDs and item to total correlations to more rigorous statistical tests that establish relevance of items within a domain of the study). It is also imperative to verify reliability and validity of the questionnaire establishing that what is being measured taps to the reality being observed by researchers and others alike. A few procedures as to how to calculate reliability and validity are highlighted with examples. A practical approach in designing non-psychometric questionnaire was elaborated by way of writing statements based on essay writing method and demonstrated ways of writing statements from various essays on certain defined domains of the study. Details were provided with regard to how item validities were calculated and then how construct/predictive validity of the questionnaire was finally verified. Three case examples were included in the paper describing the detailed process required in a questionnaire design methodology.