Refining Training and Building Capacity in Questionnaire Design (303383)

Keywords: training, capacity building, teaching approaches, conceptual tools, pedagogic resources

Questionnaire design is often described as an art, with researchers crafting questions out of empirical evidence and collective experience to meet a project’s individual needs (Converse & Presser, 1986). The novice must rapidly acquire knowledge, skills and experience, learning how to apply what they know to varied research contexts. The development of the novice questionnaire designer is often facilitated by more experienced research practitioners who pass on knowledge, share skills and induct team members in the usage of different questionnaire design, testing and evaluation methods. Yet this training and capacity building (TCB) is often a taken-for-granted element, receiving scant attention or left to trial and error (Earley, 2014). This workshop is aimed at practitioners who are involved in TCB and will provide a space for participants to reflect and to discuss, thus helping to make their implicit TCB knowledge explicit in a way that makes it more amenable to development. The workshops aims to provide participants with i) conceptual tools to think with; (ii) approaches, strategies, techniques and tasks with which to enhance TCB; and (iii) resources developed in response to the particular challenges associated with face-to-face and online TCB in this field. The workshop will draw on the latest research on the teaching and learning of advanced social research methods.

Converse, J.M. & Presser, S. (1986) Survey Questions: Handicrafting the standardized questionnaire. Newbury Park: Sage.

Earley, M.A. (2014) A synthesis of the literature on research methods education. Teaching in Higher Education. 19, 3: 242–253