Divide and Rule
Every sociologist was taught how to make questionnaires. Every sociologist knows how to formulate questions, to generate variants of answers, etc. But not every sociologist knows how to design good form design of a questionnaire.
The whole international association exists where members explore and improve the management of business forms for 50 years. Is it possible to use the achievements of the form designers and other experts of the form management industry without studying the new realm of science?
Present-day informational technologies help us to implement the principles of effective form management in our questionnaires. Our usual mistake in the process of questionnaire development is we combine the content and the form. E.g. constructing the next question we make a decision not only about the wording but also about the font family, size, etc. This linkage forces us to develop not only the content of questionnaire (where we are the experts), but also the form (where the experts are others 🙂 ). The right way is to separate the content from the form, to concentrate on the first and to delegate the second to the experts.
Special technical standard exists, it’s called XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language. The usual document consists of one file that includes both content and form, e.g. file created in MS Word or OpenOffice.org Writer. An XML document consists of three parts. The first one is the description of our document type. E.g. a questionnaire can consist of question blocks, every question block consists of the text of question and area for answer. The answer can be of different types. In case of open-ended question, the answer is a free space for text, in case of close-ended question the answer consists of some variants, etc. Note that the first block doesn’t include information on how to display (or print) the questionnaire, only what is the structure of the questionnaire. The second part of XML-document contains information about possible ways of displaying this document type. E.g. questionnaire XML-document can include information on how to print it and how to publish it on the Internet. The third part contains the data of our specific questionnaire.
The theory is interesting, but what about the practice?
In Australia there is a forms management consultant Robert Barnett, the member of before-mentioned Association, who published book “The Form Designer’s Quick Reference Guide” in 1994. In the same country there is a sociologist Adam Zammit from the Deakin Computer Assisted Research Facility who “attempted to follow the guidelines and principles” in this book and created XML-scheme for questionnaires. It’s called queXML. An overview of the structure of queXML you can find on the site of queXML-project.
A questionnaire created in queXML can be exported in some types: printable PDF-version, LimeSurvey electronic questionnaire, SPSS, and some others. The printable version follows the next principles of Barnett’s books:
- Using white boxes on a light coloured background (grey)
- Ideal box size being 4-5mm squared
- Ideal line weight being 0.2 to 0.5 points
- Using a serif font of at least 12 points
- Using “Eye guides” to determine what responses need to be selected
- Using “dotted” delimiters for filling out specific width text fields