Course Descriptions

This course focuses on the development of the survey instrument, the questionnaire. Topics include wording of questions (strategies for factual and non-factual questions), cognitive aspects, order of response alternatives, open versus closed questions, handling sensitive topics, combining individual questions into a meaningful questionnaire, issues related to question order and context, and aspects of a questionnaire other than questions. Questionnaire design is shown as a function of the mode of data collection such as face-to-face interviewing, telephone interviewing, mail surveys, diary surveys, and computer-assisted interviewing.