Producing the preliminary questionnaire or test

At last you are ready to produce a preliminary version of the questionnaire or scale. There are a few more points to bear in mind at this stage.

Anonymity, ethics and the law

There are a number of ethical and legal points to bear in mind when collecting answers to your scale items. Some guidelines from relevant professional and academic organisations are indicated in Appendix 4.

The basic suggestions listed later should ensure that you do not break any laws or offend anyone.

It is now normally required that when administering any questionnaire under the auspices of any educational or medical or other institutions, you need to get permission from the institution’s research ethics committee. If you are working with special groups such as children, medical patients, disturbed or disabled people, then further precautions will have to be taken, including liaising with your research ethics committee that may be helpful about what you need to be careful about. Signed consent may have to be obtained from carers or parents.

Ethically and legally, you may not collect and store information about people in a way that could abuse their trust in giving you information about what they think or feel.

If you are collecting information on one occasion only, anonymity should be guaranteed. Do not, therefore, ask for people’s names. It is a good idea to point out explicitly that names should not be written on your forms or questionnaires.

However, if you want to follow-up your participants on a second or subsequent occasion, then you will almost certainly have to identify them and collect details of how to locate them again.

Follow these rules:

• 1. Ensure that identification (name, address, phone number) is on a separate sheet of paper from other information given by the participant, and do not enter identification onto the same database as the research information given by the participants.
• 2. Make clear to participants that this information will be destroyed as soon as the follow-up is completed.
• 3. Make sure that you destroy the information as soon as follow-up is completed.
• 4. Meanwhile assign each participant a code number, which will enable you to line up the follow-up information with the first lot of information.
• 5. Do not cheat - do not look at the names of who said what, even if the names mean nothing to you. This will protect anonymity if you should ever come across those people again.

As well as guaranteeing anonymity, you need to include a verbal or written assurance that the person giving the information is free to withdraw at any time and does not need to give reasons for his or her withdrawal. Some older tests and questionnaires have stern commands such as: ‘Answer all the questions. Do not leave any out’. It is better to avoid this kind of talk. If it is in the participant’s interest to answer all the questions - for instance if you are trying to get a performance score, or a diagnosis of some kind - you can say something like: ‘Try to answer all the questions’, or ‘A better/more meaningful result will be obtained if you attempt to answer all the questions’. If it is only in the interests of the investigation to get all the answers, then it is better to add an explicit statement such as ‘If you prefer to omit any question for any reason, please feel free to do so’.

Demographic and other data: Deciding what is needed

As well as wanting responses to your items, you need to be clear about what other information you need. Decide what you need and work out a format for the information. Background information might include

Age

Gender

Occupation

Religion, etc.

Do not ask for any unnecessary information, and again, be careful not to cause offense.