Rubbish in, rubbish out – have you ever discovered too late that your questions did not deliver useful or useable data? Learn the art of writing effective questions and combining them into a meaningful questionnaire. Drawing on both experience and research findings from questionnaire design experiments, this course was full of practical advice.

Rubbish in, rubbish out – have you ever discovered too late that your questions did not deliver useful or useable data? Learn the art of writing effective questions and combining them into a meaningful questionnaire.  Drawing on both experience and research findings from questionnaire design experiments, this course was full of practical advice.  It covered:

● General principles of designing questions (e.g., getting started with new questionnaires, common pitfalls to avoid, problematic formats)

● An exercise in critique existing survey questions

● An exercise in writing new questions

● Creating the questionnaire as a whole

● Special issues for interview versus self-completion design (including the pitfalls of poor visual layout in postal and web surveys)

● Some essentials of piloting

The day was led by Dr Pamela Campanelli. Pamela is a Survey Methods Consultant, Chartered Statistician and Chartered Scientist. She received her Ph.D. in statistics from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in Survey Research Methods from the University of Michigan. Pamela has worked at the University of Michigan, the US Bureau of the Census and has been Chief Research Officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and a Research Director at the National Centre for Social Research. Her main interests are in the study of survey error and data quality issues, focusing on both the data collection and analysis side. In addition to her consultancy work and courses for the SRA, Pamela regularly teaches for CASS (Centre for Applied Social Surveys), CCSR (Centre for Census and Survey Research), the Royal Statistical Society, for various government departments and research institutes, and for a wide range of universities both in the UK and abroad. She is currently working on a joint ESRC grant which explores the portability of question formats across different methods of data collection.

In 2006 Pamela co-founded QTraining Complete with Liz Spencer. Both Pamela and Liz are dedicated to providing research training that is lively and engaging, communicating concepts in a straightforward and accessible way and providing workshops to put theory into practice.