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Automating questionnaire design and construction*
When devising survey questionnaires it is often useful to reuse questions and other questionnaire objects from previous, similar surveys. The notion of reuse leads us to consider the creation of searchable libraries of standard questions. However, a major problem is how to represent routing and specialisation information in a question outside the scope of the original questionnaire. This paper describes a set of representations and methods that have been conceived to aid in the construction of libraries of standard questions and other questionnaire components. The computational inspiration behind these arose in work on object orientation and reusable components. The library components contain embedded knowledge of particular survey domains and our method simplifies the management of that knowledge. This paper introduces the notion of context tokens to provide a mechanism for encapsulating knowledge about the applicability of individual question objects. In so doing, context tokens form flexible links between the stock questions which may be used to direct the construction of questionnaires. Furthermore, they ensure that the questionnaires constructed are well organised and that the conditional routing paths within them are both complete and correct.
Motivation
Almost all research surveys use some form of questionnaire as a data collection mechanism. Many involve the reuse of questions from previous studies. Both for reasons of consistency and validity, this paper considers the reuse of questions as components of a questionnaire - not the reuse of data collected for previous studies.
Our goal is to be able to create libraries of questions, the contents of which may be used in the construction of questionnaires such as the sample shown in Figure 1. The sample is a part of a questionnaire given to visitors of a tourist attraction.
It demonstrates two aspects of interest when attempting to compromise between the generality required for composing standardised questionnaire objects and the controlled specialisation to be introduced when such objects (questions) are incorporated into a questionnaire under design. The aspects of interest are:
* Specialisation. Two of the questions (Q4 and Q6) include the name of the visitor attraction within their texts.
* Routing. Depending upon their answer at Q4, respondents are directed to answer Q5 next or to skip directly to Q6. In addition, Q5...