Questions: Questionnaires and Interviews
Content
The course will include evidence-based discussions of such topics as:
We will also consider context effects such as the impact of interviewer characteristics and external noise on responses, assessment and mitigation of assimilation and contrast, order and ‘house’ effects, and the ‘spiral of silence’.
At the design stage we discuss the issues of rankings versus ratings, vague quantifiers, drifting referents, and non-ipsative data. We consider how to calibrate scores across respondents, and how to validate multiple items, and minimize the effects of incomplete coverage.
At the analysis stage we consider strategies for handling open or open-ended questions, secondary or fragmented data, and complex survey designs, including panels, repeated cross-sections in comparative research, and the effects for pooling, and of item and subject heterogeneity.
The clinic will have a mixed character: focusing on interview and questionnaire design as well as on the analysis of survey data, while using the latter partly as a platform to discuss the former. This reflects the notion that beyond indispensable basics about interviews and questionnaires better survey research requires more experience with the actual use of survey data for analysis, and with problems in the analysis stage that originate in the design of studies and questionnaires.