Learning How to Carry Out Empirical Research with Structured Interviews

This course aims at providing students with the knowledge of creating questionnaires for structured interviews and how to transfer the responses into a data set that is analyzable with statistical methods. Thus, we will talk about, e.g., filter questions, multiple choice questions, and ranking questions in questionnaires and many other aspects of questionnaires. In a further step, it will be shown, how the responses of the interviewees can be transferred into a meaningful data set. In other words: one has to assign codes to the answers given by the respondents. A lot of work connected to surveys and assigning codes to responses is nowadays taken over by online softwares, like e.g. Qualtrics or Survey Monkey. I will briefly introduce one of these survey softwares. However, since it is absolutely crucial that the students understand how a correct data set is constructed from structured interviews, the course will concentrate on the “do-it-yourself” of data set creation.

 

Topics

Questionnaire construction
Types of questions in a questionnaire
Assigning codes to answers