If you follow these guidelines, you should be able to produce a competent questionnaire, though you are unlikely to produce a foolproof one. There will always be at least one question which proves to be inadequate, or which brings an indignant response. You would be well advised, as with the use of any research technique, to pilot your questionnaire before you carry out the full survey, and to modify your questions in the light of the responses you receive.
Keeping notes
To record, and reflect upon, your progress during this phase, you will need to keep notes in some form. These may deal with your plans, how they change in practice, your reactions, what you read, what you think, significant things that people say to you, and what you discover.
You do have considerable flexibility about how you keep records of the progress of your research project. Here are some alternatives:
• Research diaries: an ideal way of keeping a record of what you are doing, feeling and thinking throughout the research project as it happens.
See the section in Chapter 2 on Keeping your research diary.
Box 6.20 Hints on questionnaire layout and presentation
• Questionnaires should be typed or printed, clearly and attractively laid out, using a typeface size which is legible.
• If you are administering your questionnaires by post or email, you should enclose a covering letter identifying yourself and describing the purposes of your survey, and providing a contact address or telephone number.
• If you are administering your questionnaires face-to-face, or over the phone, you should introduce yourself first, give a contact address or tele-phone number if requested, and be prepared to answer questions about your survey.
• If the questions you are asking are at all sensitive, and this will be the case for almost any questionnaire, you should start by assuring your respondents of the confidentiality of their individual replies.
• Make sure any instructions you give on how the respondent is expected to answer the questions are clear.
• It is usually better to keep the kind of response expected – ticking, circling or writing in – constant.
• It is desirable that the length of the questionnaire is kept within reasonable limits, but at the same time it is better to space questions well so that the questionnaire does not appear cramped.
• If the questionnaire is lengthy or complicated, and you are expecting a substantial number of replies, you should think about coding the answers in advance on the questionnaire to speed up data input.
• Remember to thank your respondents at the end of the questionnaire, and to invite their further comments and questions.
• Boxes or files: keep all the material you are collecting in a number of boxes, one for each subject or chapter.
• Coloured paper and sticky notes: some people find these a helpful, even fun, way of organizing their records.
• Computers: you may input your thoughts, records and references direct onto a computer. Software is available to help extract, arrange and index materials. Remember to keep a back up copy, and to print out an up-to-date version every so often.
See the section in Chapter 5 on Using computers.
• Card indexes: these can be particularly useful for keeping details of refer-ences, organized by author or subject.
Some examples of the alternative strategies developed by actual small-scale social science researchers for keeping research records are included in Box 6.21.
Box 6.21 Keeping research records
William decided that he would keep all his material according to its relevancy to particular chapters of his thesis. He made this decision after a few months of his research, when he was feeling overwhelmed and directionless. Putting material into chapter files helped him gain a sense of progress and control, although he recognized that he would subsequently move material between files.
Jez decided that she would not use cards as the basis of her bibliographic index, as they would not be easily transportable. Instead, she bought a note-book with alphabetic sections and used this to record her growing literature. It provided her with a manageable resource which she subsequently typed onto her laptop.
Mary wanted to store the different types of material she was collecting accord-ing to type. She therefore used A4 box files, which were categorized in terms of literature reviews, interview transcripts, respondents’ completed diaries and tape recordings.
Vena was going to do most of her literature research online, using electronic databases and journals. Her supervisor recommended that she learn to use RefWorks before she began.
Hint: However you decide to keep a record of your research in progress, it is very sensible to keep at least two copies of your records, each in a different place.
Spare yourself the heartache of lost and irreplaceable files.
Chasing up
The other aspect to being meticulous is chasing up your own progress, and the responses that you are expecting from others. Your research plans may look fine on paper, and you may have allowed plenty of time for collecting data, but you cannot expect other people to be as enthusiastic about, and committed to, your research as you are yourself. You may not be able to readily access all of the documents that interest you. Not everybody will readily grant your requests for interviews. You may be denied access to some of the events or settings which you wish to observe. The response rate to your questionnaire survey may be disappointing.
What can you do about this? There are two kinds of responses, which can be used in conjunction. On the one hand, you may need to be realistic and flex-ible about your expectations for collecting data. You don’t need a 100 percent response rate; you don’t need to read every last word written on your subject area; perhaps it doesn’t matter if you don’t interview every member of the management team or observe every meeting. You can get a great deal of infor-mation without experiencing everything, and even then you’ll probably never have time to analyse it all.
On the other hand, you can increase your response rate significantly by keeping tabs on your progress and assiduously following up your respondents.
Possible strategies here might include:
• sending reminder letters to potential survey respondents who have not replied by your initial deadline;
• telephoning unwilling interviewees on a number of occasions;
• making yourself amenable to the librarian or custodian of the documents which you wish to get access to;
• maintaining regular contacts with the key people, or gatekeepers, for your research.