ran a questionnaire and it basically just got out of hand. It was extremely difficult to mark because people were producing huge volumes of stuff. But this session now is just basically to introduce you to how this sort of data is collected, but you won’t be doing this as part of the assessment. So, your questions, they need to be precise, and I’m going to show you some examples of good and bad questions in a moment. You need to decide very carefully, I think, on the ordering. I think there’s really not an excuse for it these days, in a sense, for getting this part of it wrong and certainly presentation is very important so we’ll talk a little bit about presentation and how you’re able to order your questions to make sure that you get – well, there’s different schools of thought, but – to make sure that you get optimum response.
CD2 Track 14 Ex 4.2
Listen to Part 2 and answer the questions. Then compare your answers with your group.
Part 2
So you’ve got to set very clear objectives as to what your questionnaire is designed to achieve. You need to say something about how you’re going to collect the data, the sorts of question that you’re going to have, the way that you word them, the flow of the questionnaire and so on. Obtaining approval is very important. In the university we have a body known as the Ethics Committee. Technically speaking, if you go out, well if you go outside the university to research anything, you need to get the approval of the Ethics Committee. And the Ethics Committee is, in many ways, a very good idea. The university, and indeed any market research body, that doesn’t want its name pulled down by the market research process, of course, so we have to, if we’re going out and indeed if students are doing projects, we have to get the implicit approval of the Ethics Committee. Sometimes that can come from the head of the department.
But two or three years ago, just for your information, the group, this group was actually a group of undergraduate students, they decided to do a market research project which was part of the assessment for the course. And they were given a free choice as to what subject they wanted to ask people about. And the explicit instruction was that the people they researched should only be members of the course. And this group came and said ‘we
92 English for Academic Study
want to do a kind of a sex survey’. And what this was, it was actually fairly innocent, although I did say, you know, this must be kept strictly within the group, and it, sort of, well, I won’t go into the details, but it was asking various pretty personal questions really. And the next thing I heard, the next thing I heard of it, was somebody called up from – I can’t remember where – but they’d actually been accosted by one of these students somewhere downtown and been asked these questions. And as you can imagine we got into a little bit of trouble about it, and we hadn’t cleared it, I hadn’t cleared it basically with the committee, because it wasn’t, well, I didn’t believe it was going out – I didn’t think it was going outside. So, anyway, there are, obviously very potential problems in that, but you do need to obtain approval. There is a Market Research Society code of practice on asking questions, on how to do research.
You need to pre-test the questionnaire. This is really important. Those of you, some of you, will be doing this for, you know, your dissertation. Some of you, I know, are collecting primary data. You need to pre-test the thing, because you’re the researcher. You’re very close to the subject. You know what you’re talking about. But you’ve got to check that other people do as well. And if you want a statistically valid sample of a hundred or two hundred people, then you’ve got to make sure that you’re collecting the data properly. And it’s here that these pre- tests, or pilots, they’re going to tell you whether it’s going to work or not.
So make sure that you do pilots and, you know, this can be, sort of, half a dozen different people that you question. I mean you’ll soon find out whether you’ve got any potential … or any doubts about the length of the questionnaire or the style of particular questions, or whether the sort of questions that you’re asking are valid. You’ll soon find out from that. So, piloting or pre- testing is really important.
CD2 Track 15 Ex 5.2
Listen to the extract. Which of the activities in 5.1 did the lecturer mention?
Now here’s an idea out of the 70s, IRD – integrated rural development. This was the idea that when you worked in rural areas with the poor, and the smallholder and so on, what you tried to do was deliver a package of assistance across the sectors, on the grounds this would give you synergy.
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