Measuring the Problem: Questionnaire

Now that you have identified a problem you must state it in a way that will allow you to measure it. You may want to wait until after you have conducted the research before creating your thesis statement.

Maybe you have decided, for example, that there appears to be a problem regarding student services at the Rajabhat. Now you must decide how to measure the problem.

I believe the easiest way for you to do this will be with a questionnaire. It is very important to consider various things before preparing the questionnaire. These include:

1. Establish the goals of the project – What you want to learn
2. Determine your sample – Whom you will interview
3. Choose interviewing methodology – How you will interview
4. Create your questionnaire – What you will ask
5. Pre-test the questionnaire, if practical – Test the questions.
6. Conduct interviews and enter data - Ask the questions.
7. Analyze the data - Produce the reports.

This list was taken from this website: http://www.chartwellsystems.com/sdesign.htm

The website is mainly about business surveys but it might give you some initial help.

Here is another site related to academic research questionnaires: http://web.utk.edu/~wrobinso/540_lec_qaire.html

For next week I hope that you can have a list of questions that you will ask on your survey. Together we can go over them and decide how appropriate they are.

Getting Started

Hi Pui. Welcome to your online source for help in completing your independent research project.

I want you to check here for my comments and different links that I hope will asist you. Also, I want you to post your work here so that I can correct it and offer you advice.

Save all your work on disk and then post it in “Create a New Post” section (I will tell you how to do this.)

First you need to decide on a...

1. Topic
I believe you already indicated you are interested in concentrating on education or the Rajabhat in particular. Now you need to narrow your topic to something more specific. Do you want to look at teaching? Students? Facilities? Once you decide on your topic, you need to identify a…

2. Problem
This is at the heart of all research. You need to do some thinking and decide what possible problems exist regarding the topic you have chosen. Once you have decided on the problem, you then need to sum up the focus and goal of your research in a…

3. Thesis Statement
This will be the entire goal of your research.

I want you to prepare these 3 things for our next meeting.

Here is a link that may help you to get started.

http://www.pemi-baker.sau48.k12.nh.us/departments/library/researchprocess/index.html

I will try to add more links as I find them so please check the site a few times a week. Come to my office whenever you need help or e-mail me at ajarnken@hotmail.com