Testing your survey questionnaire is absolutely essential for ensuring a high quality survey. There has been a proliferation of question testing methods (both new methods and variations of existing methods). This course covers 20 different question testing techniques and combines information from the survey methodological literature with practical advice and hands on practice. The course covers methods for testing quantitative interview-based, web and mail questionnaires looking both at standard methods as well as new and unusual techniques. Overall the course covers: standard field test, interviewer rating form and variations, behaviour coding (classical, sequence-based and shortened), expert review, systematic form appraisal (including two online programmes), respondent debriefing (including vignettes and web probing), cognitive interviewing (short introduction), focus groups, split ballot tests, usability testing, studying item nonresponse and response distribution patterns, reliability and validity, record check studies, paradata, an introduction to analysis based methods (latent class, multi-trait-multi-method procedure and item response theory), eye tracking, computational linguistics, and crowd sourcing).

Introduction to Applied Questionnaire Design is a course that complements well with this class.

Prerequisite: There is no prerequisite, but some knowledge of questionnaire design is of value.