Reading Assignment - Designing Survey Questions

In one of the second year service courses I taught this semester, some people were unable to do the participation assignment for non-academic reasons. This means I needed an alternative assignment, which gave me a chance to field test the following reading assignment.

This is based on Chapter 8 of the book Successful Surveys - Research Methods and Practice by George Gray and Neil Guppy. The chapter is "Designing Questions of the book Successful Surveys."

This assignment turned out to be pretty easy, so it could work as a warm-up for upcoming statistical writing classes. I didn't receive feedback from the students on how long it took, but I imagine it would be 2-4 hours for an undergrad. Even if you don't want to use the same reading chapter as I did, many of these questions could be answerable with another reading source with minimal modification.

 Q1. Give an example of a numerical (e.g. quantitative) open-ended question and a numerical closed-ended question.

Q2. Give an example of a non-numerical (e.g. nominal, text-based) open-ended question and a non-numerical closed-ended question.

Q3. In your OWN WORDS, give two advantages and disadvantages of open-ended questions.

Q4. In your OWN WORDS, give two advantages and disadvantages of closed-ended questions.

Q5. How do field coded questions combine the features of both open- and closed-ended questions.

Q6. For what kind of surveys are open-ended questions more useful? When are they less useful?

Q7. What are five features that make for well worded questions.

Q8. What is the name used for a survey question that asks about and focuses on two distinct things?

Q9. What is a Likert scale?

Q10. What are four things that all have important effects on how people respond to survey questions?

You finished the assignment! Go enjoy some time at the lake. <3