Welcome to part four of weeks three and four of the Capstone Project.. We will discuss the organization of survey questions to ensure the best responses from your participants. Also, we will consider ways to conduct a short interview. The organization of your questions in this survey is very important too. Three aspects of organization to look out for are these, be logical, ensure that questions are easy to answer and provide realistic options. Be logical, make it easy to start the survey. Put simple questions first and more complex questions later. Put questions in similar categories together. For example, questions about the channel of communication should be asked before you move to questions regarding the level of formality to adopt. As far as possible, make transitions from question to question and section to section as smooth as possible. Provide clear instructions. For example, should the respondents tick, circle, rank, or rate? Avoid questions that make your respondents look from one question to another as in the example. If you answered a in question eight, go to question 12. If you answered b in question five, go to question 14. Ensure that questions are easy to answer. Avoid sensitive or personal questions. Ask yourself if you really need to know the respondent's age, income, and occupation. If you do need to get this information, ask for it at the end of the questionnaire when it will not matter too much if the respondents decide not to complete it. Avoid asking for difficult information that requires too much brain work on the part of the respondent as seen in the example. Asking someone to rank in order of their preference the 12 most preferred avenues of communicating change may just be too many items to rank. If you must use ranking questions, limit the variables to four or five. Provide realistic options. Make sure the choices you offer are mutually exclusive. That is the options should not overlap in any way. Avoid multi-topic questions. Not only are they difficult to answer, they also make the responses invalid as seen in the example. Do you talk to colleagues daily and over the phone or email? Include don't know, others, and no opinion categories where appropriate. This also means providing an odd number of options in rating questions. Besides the survey, you may want to conduct an interview instead, to gather professional opinion on communicating change. Let us now briefly look at some reminders for conducting a face-to-face interview. As with surveys, the interview may consist of open-ended questions. For designing good open-ended questions, remember to keep the language simple. Always ask about one idea at a time. Keep an objective tone and avoid biasness. Avoid sensitive or personal questions. And avoid asking for difficult information that requires too much brain-work. Non-verbal behavior is very important in an interview. Here are some reminders on non-verbal behavior for the interview. Make eye contact with the interviewee for a few seconds at a time. Smile and nod at appropriate times, when the interviewer is talking, but do not overdo it. Do not laugh unless the interviewee does first. Be polite and keep and keep an even tone to your speech. Don't be too loud or too quiet. Do not slouch. Do relax and lean forward a little towards the interviewee so you appear interested and engaged. Do not lean back, you will look too casual and relaxed. Pay close attention to the interviewee. Take notes if you're worried you will not remember something. Listen. Do not interrupt. Not sure what to do with your hands? Hold a pen and your notepad or rest an arm on the chair or on your lap, so that you look comfortable. Do not let your arms fly around the room when you're making a point. In summary, we have looked at the following aspects of the collection of data. For the organization of severe questions, we discussed the need to be logical and ensure that questions are easy to answer and provide realistic options. For the interview, we looked at interview questions and non-verbal behavior.
