Use clear and simple questions. If you are collecting data about the outcome of enhanced writing skills, don’t get sidetracked by asking questions about working with fractions. It is always a good idea to test out the questions ahead of time to see if they are clear and if you are getting relevant responses. Try to make the questions as specific as possible. For example, instead of asking “how are you using your new literacy skills?” you could ask “do you find yourself writing notes and memos on the job more often than you did before?”
Another thing to think about is taking notes during the focus group. It can be difficult for the facilitator to take notes because he/she should be listening carefully to the responses and encouraging discussion. Therefore, it is a good idea to have someone appointed as a notetaker. Often, that person does not actually participate in the focus group so that he/she can concentrate on taking the notes.
There are a variety of ways that you can conduct a survey. You can administer surveys one-on-one, either in person or over the telephone. You can create a print-based survey and distribute it by mail. Or you could invite a group of people to come into the literacy centre and complete a print-based survey there. If you want to use technology, you can create an online survey. If you do an Internet search on survey creating, you will find many free sites to help you create, administer and tabulate your surveys online. Two examples are www.zoomerang.com and www.surveymonkey.com.
When you are designing your survey, it is important to remember what information you want to collect. Just as we discussed about focus groups, remember to keep your questions focused on the topic at hand. And again it is a good idea to test out the questions ahead of time to see if they are clear and if you are able to gather useful results. Try to keep the survey as short as possible; people quickly tire of long and repetitive surveys.
Basically, there are two types of questions that can be asked. The first type is “closed” questions. This type of question provides a series of choices as answers and allows responses to be tracked on a scale. For example, you could ask if someone is writing more often, less often or the same as they were before they enrolled with your agency. You can expand the scale by adding qualifiers such as “much more often” or “a little more often”. The choice is up to you. However, giving people at least three choices, but no more than five is probably ideal in most cases.
The benefit of closed questions is that they provide more reliable data than open questions because you are limiting the choice of responses. This makes the responses easy to tabulate. However, we have probably all tried to answer a question and thought “I wouldn’t pick any of those choices”, so you might also want to include the option for people to provide additional comments.