Many visitors of my website ask me : "how to build a questionnaire on such or such subject? " There are many answers to that question. It will always depend on the circumstances characterizing each survey. All surveys are threatened by many difficulties when it is time to decide how to ask questions. All those threats share a common characteristic. How to communicate to the person what we precisely want to know. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to solve this problem by following a method.

Initially, it is important that the researcher specifies its global objective. Which problem does he want to solve? What is "the" reason for this survey? It is what will makes it possible to avoid asking futile questions. Too much often, a questionnaire is lengthened by questions which seem interesting, but are irrelevant regarding the goal of the survey.

It is important, to never forget that a long questionnaire is also implying biggest difficulties to have it adequately filled. It is a paramount issue to clearly state the priority of a survey. Beware, you must resist to the temptation of identify more than one objective. In some cases, the difficulty to identify only one goal could camouflage a lack of precision with the elements you wish to measure by doing your survey.

Secondly, you must decide how your objective will be divided. That will gives you what is called dimensions. Each dimension constitutes a type of elements that shall measure in order to fulfill the requirements of our global objective. For example, if our global objective is :"having a portrait of the summer jobs found by students ", our dimensions could be: the student, his field of study and the summer job.

In third place, there is the identification of what will enable us to "measure" our dimensions. It is what we can call : indicators. Each indicator represents one of the measures to be taken to have a precise idea of the composition of our dimension. That means, each indicator shall represents the goal of a question. But, what you measure by each question is called : variable. Thus, the relation between the variable and the indicator is the following : the indicator is the objective of the question whereas the variable is its answer, its "measurement". In our example, one of our dimensions was "the field of study". One of our indicators and its variable could be: identification of the program measured either by the name of the program of study or or by the field of study. Note that if a dimension can regroup several indicators, there should be only one variable for each indicator. So, the variable is "the" measurement of the indicator.

The following diagram will enable you to visualize the components of our example:

By proceeding in this manner, you gain various advantages. You know exactly how many questions to ask, the contents of those questions and furthermore, you decrease the chances to end up with an ambiguous question somewhere.

In fourth place, all that it left to do, it is to write down your questions and carry out a pretest. What is important there, is to identify people that share similar characteristics with those you want to reach in your survey. In doing so, you will be able to pinpoint any misleading element in your questionnaire. You are now ready to use your questionnaire in the real life. I wish you a good survey!