The instrument design process starts with a comprehensive list of investigative questions drawn from the management— research question hierarchy. Instrument design is a three phase process with numerous issues within each phase: (a) developing the instrument design strategy, (b) constructing and refining the measurement questions, and (c) drafting and refining the instrument.
Several choices must be made in designing a communication study instrument. Surveying can be a face-to-face interview, or it can be much less personal, using indirect media and self-administered questionnaires. The questioning process can be unstructured, as in an IDI, or the questions can be clearly structured. Responses may be unstructured and openended or structured with the participant choosing from a list of possibilities. The degree to which the objectives and intent of the questions should be disguised must also be decided.
Instruments obtain three general classes of information. Target questions address the investigative questions and are the most important. Classification questions concern participant characteristics and allow participants' answers to be grouped for analysis. Administrative questions identify the participant, interviewer, and interview location and conditions.
Question construction involves three critical decision areas. They are (a) question content, (b) question wording, and (c) response strategy. Question content should pass the following tests: Should the question be asked? Is it of proper scope? Can and will the participant answer adequately? Question wording difficulties exceed most other sources of distortion in surveys. Retention of a question should be confirmed by answering these questions: Is the question stated in terms of a shared vocabulary? Does the vocabulary have a single meaning? Does the question contain misleading assumptions? Is the wording biased? Is it correctly personalized? Are adequate alternatives presented? The study's objective and participant factors affect the decision of whether to use open-ended or closed questions. Each response strategy generates a specific level of data, with available statistical procedures for each scale type influencing the desired response strategy. Participant factors include level of information about the topic, degree to which the topic has been thought through, ease of communication, and motivation to share information. The decision is also affected by the interviewer's perception of participant factors. Both dichotomous response and multiple-choice questions are valuable, but on balance the latter are preferred if only because few questions have only two possible answers. Checklist, rating, and ranking strategies are also common.
Question sequence can drastically affect participant willingness to cooperate and the quality of responses. Generally, the sequence should begin with efforts to awaken the participant's interest in continuing the interview. Early questions should be simple rather than complex, easy rather than difficult, non-threatening, and obviously germane to the announced objective of the study. Frame-of-reference changes should be minimal, and questions should be sequenced so that early questions do not distort replies to later ones.
Sources of questions for the construction of questionnaires include the literature on related research and sourcebooks of scales and questionnaires. Borrowing items has attendant risks, such as time and situation-specific problems or reliability and validity. Incompatibility of language and idiom also needs to be considered.. . .
