Two-day course on questionnaire design and measurement

This is a two-day course on questionnaire design and measurement, taught by Professor Jon A. Krosnick (Stanford University), running 5th and 6th of May at the LSE. The course is organized by the LSE’s Methodology Institute, Ipsos-MORI and the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Further details can be found at: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/methodologyInstitute/newsEvents/Krosnick.aspx

The two-day course is free for LSE students and staff, £100 for non-LSE students, £200 for the public sector (including non-LSE University staff) and £400 for the private-sector.

Applications can be made at: https://eshop.lse.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=71&deptid=212&catid=40

Surveys and questionnaires are a common way of gathering data in the social sciences. The structuring, wording and ordering of questions has traditionally been viewed as an art, not a science, best guided by intuition. But in recent years, it has become clear that this is an antiquated and even dangerous view that does not reflect the accumulation of knowledge throughout the social sciences about effective question-asking. Intuition often leads us astray in the questionnaire design field, as becomes clear when putting intuitions to the test via scientific evaluation. A large body of relevant scientific studies has now accumulated, and when taken together, the findings point to a series of formal rules for how best to design questions. Yet the vast majority of contemporary questionnaire design fails to follow these rules, because they are not yet widely understood. During the past 25 years, Jon Krosnick has been gathering up the huge body of evidence on optimal questionnaire design for this forthcoming book, The Handbook of Questionnaire Design. In this course, Dr. Krosnick will review the contents of the first half of the book.

The two-day course educates participants about the optimal techniques for questionnaire design, for guarding against measurement artifacts, and for analyzing data in order to overcome the biasing impact of such artifacts. The course will teach participants a new way of thinking about questionnaire design, rooted in psychology. By gaining insight into how respondents approach their tasks of interpreting questions, searching their memories for information, integrating that information into judgments, and expressing those judgments in words, workshop participants will begin to develop skills that will help them to mange design issues for which there are not yet formal rules. In addition to helping participants to design better questionnaires, the two-day course will also equip analysts of questionnaire data to look from a new perspective as they evaluate the meaning of their findings, knowing how measurement artifacts can lead them astray.