Groot, Merel S. de

English

de Groot, M.S.

NARCIS 

Dealing with Divergent Demands: Questionnaire construction between longitudinal and comparative constraints

University of Twente Research Information

15of underlying concepts. Based on this input and the advice of substantive and methodological experts,items or scales are then adopted, re-designed or discarded.The work on the rotating modules is carried out jointly by the selected team of academics incollaboration with a subset of the CCT. To some extent during earlier rounds of the project and as faras possible during the latest Round 3, attempts have been made to better document the process. Butfurther work is needed to improve the structure of and accessibility to this documentation.Data users are already provided with through documentation of the ESS methodology and ques-tionnaire design needs to meet these same high standards. During Round 4 we intend to improve suchdocumentation by asking the Question Design Teams and CCT to document process via a pre-designedtemplate. The template and guidelines will be included in the paper and suggestions for improvementsdiscussed. The paper will consider the balance between the burden of demands on the design teamand the utility of the documentation for translators and data users. The ability to use this style ofdocumentation for other surveys will also be discussed in the context of improving comparability ofquestionnaire design in a cross-national context.Dealing with Divergent Demands: Questionnaire Construction Between Longitudinal and Com-parative ConstraintsMerel S. de Groot; University of Twente, NetherlandsIn 2002 a new Local Government Act was introduced in The Netherlands. Initiators of this new Actexpected attitudinal and behavioural change of municipal councillors. To determine if these expec-tations come out, a pre-measurement and post-measurement are needed. In 1999 a pre-measurementwas conducted, a post-measurement will be conducted in the spring of 2007. With respect to this post-measurement several aspects need to be thought over, a.o. data collection, research population, researchsample and the questionnaire. Especially the questionnaire construction faces various difficulties, result-ing from divergent demands imposed by longitudinal versus internationally comparative comparability.To start it is a longitudinal research: the questionnaire should be comparable to the 1999 questionnaire.Secondly, the Dutch research is imbedded in an international council survey conducted in 15 Europeancountries (Municipal Assemblies in European Local Government in Transition: MAELG project). Eachparticipating country has one or more national coordinators that will conduct the survey. The coordi-nators/experts have been working together on the development of the survey design, the questionnaireand strict guidelines on issues such as sampling and response rates. The aim is to achieve the higheststandards of cross-national research. Both objectives – longitudinal and internationally comparativecomparability - ask for several requirements, sometimes coinciding, sometimes conflicting. This papersets forth a number of questionnaire formulation problems stemming from divergent demands, and ar-gues the solutions we have chosen during the preparation on the council survey. The problems andsolutions are embedded in a more general framework of identical/equivalent indicators (Van Deth (ed.)1998; Przeworski and Teune 1966/1970).Comparative Questionnaire Design: a Review of Current PracticeSue Ellen Hansen; University of Michigan, United StatesJanet Harkness; Centre for Survey Research and Methodology (GESIS-ZUMA), GermanyAna Villar; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, United StatesManuel de la Puente; US Census Bureau, United StatesDesign of questionnaires for comparative research generally involves the following four decisions:1. whether to adopt existing questions, adapt existing questions, write new questions, or develop aquestionnaire that is a mix of adopted, adapted, and new questions;2. whether to ask the same questions (ASQ), ask different questions (ADQ), or develop a question-naire that is a mix of the same and different questions;

http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/68608

Dealing with Divergent Demands: Questionnaire Construction Between Longitudinal and Comparative Constraints

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

NARCIS

University of Twente Research Information