Introduction

Format of questions

Open and closed questions

Analysing the result

A quick guide

Analysing the Results of Questionnaires

All of the information that you have collected in your questionnaires needs to be collated and transferred on to one or two sheets so that you can produce useful statistics. Pre-coding your questionnaire will make this task much easier and even if you did not pre-code your questions you will have to do some coding now. Coding simply means:

Prepare a grid with the questionnaire numbers across the top and the question numbers down the side and enter the coded answers in the appropriate place:

  Questionnaire Number
? No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 4              
2 3              
3 2              
4                
5                
6                
7                
8                

In the above example I have started to enter coded answers; on Questionnaire No. I the answer to question 1 was 4, the answer to question 2 was 3, and the answer to question 3 was 2. Simply continue completing the grid in this fashion for all of your questionnaires. Once the chart is complete you can add up the answers to different questions and turn them into percentages, draw graphs, produce pie charts or whatever from them.

Suppose that question one in the above example was about housing:

Q. 1 Where do you live? Own House 1
    Rented House 2
    Own Flat 3
    Rented Flat 4

You can see from the grid that the person completing questionnaire number 1 answered 4 to this question and therefore lives in a rented flat. It is fairly easy to count up the various answers to question 1 by looking down the column. Perhaps the totals look like this:

Own House 10
Rented House 20
Own Flat 10
Rented Flat

60

Which means that in our imaginary sample of 100 people:

10% live in their own house
20% live in a rented house
10% live in their own flat
60% live in a rented flat

It is relatively straightforward to code closed questions in this way but it is much more difficult to evaluate open questions. The best way of evaluating open questions is to review responses and try to categorize them into a small set of broader categories which can then be coded. Coding open questions is not always straightforward and you will have to read all of the answers first. You must then try to group this disconnected comments and responses into meaningful categories. Even then it may be useful to have an 'other' or 'miscellaneous' category for those responses that you are unable to categorise. Having a category for all respondents who either don't know or didn't answer is very important as this provides useful information on the strength of feeling over a particular question.

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