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1 Introduction
Questionnaires are one of the most widely used means of collecting data, and therefore many novice researchers in business and management and other areas of the social sciences associate research with questionnaires. Given their prevalence, it is to easy to assume that questionnaires are easy to design and use; this is not the case - a lot of effort goes into creating a good questionnaire that collects the data that answers your research questions and attracts a sufficient response rate. In this article, we use the term research questionnaire to refer to questionnaires that are used as part of an academic research project. Others ([3] Bryman and Bell, 2011) use the term self-completion questionnaire, or the related terms self-administered questionnaire or postal or mail questionnaire. Further, we use the term questionnaire to refer to documents that include a series of open and closed questions to which the respondent is invited to provide answers. Research questionnaires may be distributed to the potential respondents by post, e-mail, as an online questionnaire, or face-to-face by hand. Interviews, especially structured and semi-structured interviews, also ask questions that the respondent is invited to answer, but the essential distinguishing characteristic of questionnaires is that they are normally designed to be completed without any direct interaction with the researcher, either in person or remotely. However, the boundary between questionnaires and interviews is fuzzy, since they are both question answering research instruments, with unstructured interviews at one end of a spectrum and questionnaires comprised of predominantly closed questions at the other end. Respondents to a questionnaire may be asked to answer questions regarding facts (e.g. their age or salary), or their attitudes, beliefs, behaviours or experiences as a citizen, manager, professional, user, consumer or employee. Since one of the main advantages of questionnaires is the ability to make contact with and gather responses from a relatively large number of people in scattered and possibly remote locations, questionnaires are typically used in surveys, where the objective is to profile a "population". This leads to consideration of who to include in the survey, or the sample. In research in organizational studies, management, and business, participants may be selected either as an individual or as a representative of their team, organization, or industry.
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