Background

Due to pretest results, a questionnaire is usually revised several times during construction. For several purposes such as data analysis and data storage, as well as further questionnaire development in future studies, it is necessary to document those revisions in detail. This extensive documentation is also indispensable for teaching in survey research. Nonetheless, this documentation is usually done only partially or not at all, due to a lack of useful documentation tools.

Project description

During the project QDDS-2 the workgroup developed a program for the documentation of questionnaire development decisions for use within in a single research project. Goal of this project was the development of a program system that allows permanent electronic documentation of questionnaire development and the final state of the instrument. The program is suitable for Paper&Pencil, Face-to-Face and CATI instruments. A database for each questionnaire contains information on formal aspects of each question, such as response categories and mode of answering. Furthermore, formal criteria such as type of question, character of replies, context and subject of the question can be saved. We stopped the development of this software with a beta-version (QDDS-2), which is available for scientific use at no cost: http://www.qdds.org

We will further develop the program as QDDS-3, thereby removing some small problems in QDDS-2 and extending the capabilities of the program. The main new feature of QDDS-3 is the ability to document, store and retrieve questionnaires and survey meta-data for large survey data archives. The program will allow to search, for example, for the survey in a data base in which a battery of dichotomous questions is followed by an open question. Furthermore, it will show the variable name of the open question and the codes gives to the answers.

QDDS-3 will conform to the DDI-standard of data archives. Finally, about 50 important surveys will be documented within QDDS-3 to illustrate the use of the program

More detailed information and software is available at: http://www.qdds.org

Project staff

Rainer Schnell (project head): University of Duisburg-Essen
Anja Zwingenberger (survey methodology): University of Duisburg-Essen
Oliver Hopt (programming): GESIS
Robert Weichselbaum (programming): GESIS
Natascha Gormanns (testing): University of Duisburg-Essen

Contact

In order to contact us, please click here Mail: anja.zwingenberger@uni-due.de  

Funding

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Project running time:

QDDS-2: January 2006 – June 2007
QDDS-3: March 2008 – August 2009