Introduction to Survey Design | Self-paced

Design high quality surveys to get accurate and inclusive results

Ever wonder how to make a survey stand out and get accurate results? Badly designed surveys waste people’s time and introduce misinformation into organizations. This hands-on training course provides practical guidance on how to develop surveys in line with well-established best practices.

About this course

This professionally designed course introduces how, why and when to use surveys for evaluation and how to avoid common pitfalls in survey design.

This course covers the following topics:

• Why use surveys for evaluation
• When you shouldn’t use surveys for evaluation.
• How to develop a “good” survey question and response options.
• Avoiding common pitfalls in survey design: How to spot a bad survey question and response options.
• Using open-ended questions in your survey.
• Using online, iPad-based and automated surveys.
• Pilot testing your survey.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Use basic principles of survey design to help you create good survey questions for evaluating public engagement outcomes.
• Develop the capability to identify problematic survey questions relating to public engagement evaluation.
• Prepare survey questions to measure public engagement outcomes that avoid the most obvious sources of bias.
• Determine how questionnaires might be used to evaluate public engagement impact.
• Explore how to systematically quantify open-ended questionnaire data.

This online course is entirely self-paced so that you can engage with the course or access resources when it is most convenient and timely for you.

Dr. Eric Jensen

Dr. Eric Jensen is an internationally-recognised social scientist specializing in innovative methods of conducting impact evaluation research in informal learning and public engagement contexts.

Dr Eric A. Jensen is a social scientist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge in sociology. Author of Doing Real Research: A Practical Guide to Social Research (SAGE), Dr Jensen brings extensive methodological expertise in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods social research and evaluation. Jensen has been working in science communication research and practice since 2001, beginning with a National Science Foundation-funded project on International Ethics and Equity Issues Relating to Biotechnology. ensen has delivered hundreds of training workshops on evaluation methods and evidence-based science communication, as well as leading and consulting on projects large and small on public engagement with research, impact evaluation, socially responsible research and environmental communication. Jensen’s latest book is Science Communication: An introduction. He works on the Responsible Research and Innovation Networking Globally social research project as a Senior Research Fellow at ICoRSA. He is part-time professor at the University of Warwick and visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Psychological Research of Sigmund Freud University.

Research Methods

Impact Evaluation

Survey Design

Qualitative Methods

Quantitative Methods

Participation notes

This course is designed to be highly practical, distilling a lot of methods and underpinning theory into clear, pragmatic guidance. Depending on how extensively the reading and supplementary material is explored it is expected to offer 16-20 hours of training. However, it is flexible since the course is aimed towards people who need to vary the amount of time they put into the course from week to week.

How To Reserve Your Place

This course is designed to be ‘self-paced’ and ‘self-completed’, therefore there are no strict limitations on course capacity.