Questionnaire Analysis for Methods
You will design a questionnaire that might be used in a survey to assess people’s attitudes toward governmental policy to reduce poverty. The survey should try to capture general attitudes about the role of government in reducing poverty rather than their positive or negative views of specific social welfare programs.
Your questionnaire should obtain the following from each respondent:
• Their demographic characteristics, including race, class, and gender
• If they plan to vote in the 2020 presidential election (pretend the 2020 election has not yet happened) and who they would like to vote for (include Trump and Biden for nomination) (a 2-part contingency question)
• The issues that are most likely to affect their vote choice in the form of a matrix question, using Likert-type responses to five statements.
This project should be 3-4 pages long. The first page should be the questionnaire laid out in the format you would use if you were actually conducting the survey. Make sure that the format will be easy to read and will not be difficult for respondents to answer. Be sure to provide appropriate spaces for respondents to check or write in their answers.
Question-wording should be simple and straightforward: avoid double-barreled questions, loaded terms, and negations. Justify your choice of open or closed-ended question. For closed-ended questions, response categories should be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Matrix questions using Likert-type responses should have a consistent scale.
In 2-3 pages, discuss these issues:
• Which measures operationalize “demographic characteristics”? Which operationalize socio-economic status?
• What concepts were you operationalizing with your questions in the issue matrix?
• Identify the level of measurement for each item and the rationale for using a close-end or open-ended question.
• You have obviously given considerable thought and care to the wording of your questions in order to avoid the common problems noted above and discussed in lectures/readings. Now, gives us 2-3 examples of alternative wording that would be problematic and tell us why.
• Explain why you asked the questions in this order. Did this ordering allow you to avoid some sort of bias? Help increase engagement.
• Put it all together for us. State one hypothesis that you could test by analyzing the data that you collect with this instrument. Refer to specific variables and the concepts that they are designed to capture.
