Whats a questionnaire

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Sociology                Research Methods

A questionnaire is a  instrument consisting of a series of  and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for  analysis of the responses, this is not always the case. The questionnaire was invented by , who is actually the cousin of Charles Darwin which allowed him to be recognised.

Questionnaires are an inexpensive way to gather data from a potentially large number of respondents. Often they are the simplest way to reach a variety of people, large enough to allow statistical analysis of the results. A well-designed questionnaire that is used effectively can gather information on both the overall performance of the test system as well as information on specific components of the system. If the questionnaire includes demographic questions on the participants, they can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the test system among different groups of users.

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It is important to remember that a questionnaire should be viewed as a multi-stage process beginning with definition of the aspects to be examined and ending with interpretation of the results. Every step needs to be designed carefully because the final results are only as good as the weakest link in the questionnaire process. Although questionnaires may be cheap to carry out compared to other data collection methods, they are every bit as expensive in terms of design time and interpretation.

Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of surveys in that they are cheap, do not require as much ...

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