In November, the Pedagogy of Methodological Learning team will be running a workshop entitled   ‘Refining Training and Building Capacity in Questionnaire Design (Workshop) at QDET2 in Miami, Florida, USA (10 November 2016). QDET2 is the 2016 International Conference on Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation and Testing. It seeks to provide a creative environment for researchers from across the world working in government, academia and the private sector to share new solutions and fresh approaches to survey measurement, questionnaire design, and evaluation. Our session details follow below.

Refining Training and Building Capacity in Questionnaire Design (303383)

*Debbie Collins, University of Southampton
Sarah Lewthwaite, University of Southampton
*Melanie Nind, University of Southampton

Keywords: training, capacity building, teaching approaches, conceptual tools, pedagogic resources

Questionnaire design is often described as an art, with researchers crafting questions out of empirical evidence and collective experience to meet a project’s individual needs (Converse & Presser, 1986). The novice must rapidly acquire knowledge, skills and experience, learning how to apply what they know to varied research contexts. The development of the novice questionnaire designer is often facilitated by more experienced research practitioners who pass on knowledge, share skills and induct team members in the usage of different questionnaire design, testing and evaluation methods. Yet this training and capacity building (TCB) is often a taken-for-granted element, receiving scant attention or left to trial and error (Earley, 2014). This workshop is aimed at practitioners who are involved in TCB and will provide a space for participants to reflect and to discuss, thus helping to make their implicit TCB knowledge explicit in a way that makes it more amenable to development. The workshops aims to provide participants with i) conceptual tools to think with; (ii) approaches, strategies, techniques and tasks with which to enhance TCB; and (iii) resources developed in response to the particular challenges associated with face-to-face and online TCB in this field. The workshop will draw on the latest research on the teaching and learning of advanced social research methods.

References

Converse, J.M. & Presser, S. (1986) Survey Questions: Handicrafting the standardised questionnaire. Newbury Park: Sage.

Earley, M.A. (2014) A synthesis of the literature on research methods education. Teaching in Higher Education. 19, 3: 242–253.

For the full online programme and further details about the conference and registration, visit the QDET2 website.