Our research project has begun to sprout legs: we've started conducting some first-hand research. From our panel of participants (equal male to female ratio, across all age ranges and a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) we started by administering a questionnaire to 25 teenagers aged 13-18 (13 girls, 12 boys). We decided to set up the survey online using Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey is probably the best online resource for creating surveys and questionnaires. The type of survey we created is a qualitative self-completion questionnaire. In order to get a solid understanding of the patterns of games consumption and considering our lack of expertise/knowledge in what games teens are consuming, we deemed this approach as being the most effective way of canvassing a lot of opinion using (relatively) minimal resources.
Compiling the questionnaire, however, was a much more difficult
proposition then I first imagined, especially when our audience is a
broad range of teenagers from 13-18. Not least how do you get teenagers to complete a survey, but how do you write questions to a
level that can be well understood by both 18yr olds and 13 yr olds?
How do you make the survey comprehensive (and long) enough so that you
get some a sufficient amount of useful material but also making sure
that the quality of answers doesn't dimish as the survey progresses?
'Respondent fatigue' as Alan Bryman calls it.
There is also a trade-off between writing questions that are composed to a level that the respondent knows what they have to write, but without being directed what to write. When compiling an open-ended self completion questionnaire, the inability to prompt and probe the respondents to elaborate on an answer is a difficult one to get round, and is something that we found really hard to bring out in this questionnaire. We made attempts at doing this, but you can do little more than offer guesswork for follow-up questions.
Having said all this, we felt that a self-completition qualitative survey was the best solution for canvassing a lot of opinion in a small period of time, to give us a good grounding in the sorts of games that teenagers are playing, with who, and what their motivations for doing so. The responses are trickling in and the next step is not only to analyse the responses but also evaluate the approach.
If you are interested in seeing the questionnaire, you can find it here, but you will have to complete each page of the survey in order to see the next questions :)
I'd really like to hear from anyone who was tried compiling qualitative questionnaires of this type, and how they've managed to overcome some of the issues described above.
There is also a trade-off between writing questions that are composed to a level that the respondent knows what they have to write, but without being directed what to write. When compiling an open-ended self completion questionnaire, the inability to prompt and probe the respondents to elaborate on an answer is a difficult one to get round, and is something that we found really hard to bring out in this questionnaire. We made attempts at doing this, but you can do little more than offer guesswork for follow-up questions.
Having said all this, we felt that a self-completition qualitative survey was the best solution for canvassing a lot of opinion in a small period of time, to give us a good grounding in the sorts of games that teenagers are playing, with who, and what their motivations for doing so. The responses are trickling in and the next step is not only to analyse the responses but also evaluate the approach.
If you are interested in seeing the questionnaire, you can find it here, but you will have to complete each page of the survey in order to see the next questions :)
I'd really like to hear from anyone who was tried compiling qualitative questionnaires of this type, and how they've managed to overcome some of the issues described above.
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