Measuring Risk Perceptions and Behaviors: Developing High-Quality Questionnaires

This interactive workshop will concentrate on methods and procedures for measuring risk perceptions and behaviors with an emphasis on developing high quality questionnsires.

Organizations responsible for environmental cleanup or protecting public health often invest considerable money and energy to collect information to better understand how stakeholders or other audiences react to, understand, or behave towards an environmental or health risk.   The resulting information may be used to direct agency or organizational policy, design management strategies, or focus how communication messages are framed and delivered. 

Surveys remain one of the most popular tools organizations use to gather information about stakeholders, clients, or other segments of the population.  Yet, questionnaires are often constructed as an afterthought and the resulting data is, at best, biased, misleading or may not adequately help the organization make good decisions.

This workshop will help participants develop skills to imrrove their abilities to develop good questions.

The question:  How do you know that you have defensible and useful information?  

At the heart of every data collection process is the questionnaire, and only a well-thought out questionnaire can generate useful data.  In fact, no elegant analysis can salvage a survey that has used a questionnaire containing invalid and unreliable measures. 

The issues that surround the art and science of questionnaire development are complex.  The most challenging of these is conceptualization, which demands a well-thought out, accurate, and precise articulation of one’s focus of inquiry.  The other issues provide more pragmatic challenges that could be framed in the following questions :  “Why do we want to know?”, “Who wants to know?”, “When do they want the information?” and “How do we get the information?”

This workshop will provide participants with a practical approach to designing high quality survey questionnaires.

Workshop Structure

Key Topics

• Problem conceptualization (What do we want to know?)
• Defining your variables (Measures or Indicators)
• Developing measures or indicators - Asking the right questions (Accuracy, Precision, Reliability and Validity Issues)
• Designing the instrument - Validation and reliability issues (Are we measuring what we think we’re measuring?)
• Designing your Instrument (Readability and Comprehension)
• Issues that compromise your data (Respondent and Instrument Issues)
• Using the Right Approach (Self-administered, Telephone, Face-to-Face and Web Surveys)

Participant Contribution

This workshop offers a  “nuts and bolts” approach to designing high quality survey questionnaires. Participants will be asked to share a questionnaire they are either planning, may be using, or have used in their work.  These questionnaires will be used as working examples to highlight issues in questionnaire development work, including identification of problamitic questions anddistinguishing vrious alternatives to questionnaire construction.

Who will Benefit?
The workshop, "Measuring Risk Perceptions and Behaviors: Developing High-Quality Questionnaires" is designed for those involved with collecting information from various public groups about risk perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, etc. In other contexts such as corporations, government agencies, etc. these workshops have been quite successful.

If you have been charged with collecting information for your unit, department, or your organization as a whole  and have encountered these constraints, this workshop is for you:

• Difficulty in determining the focus of inquiry of your survey effort (research design, conceptual framework, measures/indicators).
• Balancing the stated survey objectives with the resources being made available to you (internal negotiation, data collection approaches, sampling, budget/staff)
• Determining what data is most important and relevant for data analysis and presentation (statistical tools)
• Articulating your organization’s survey needs to external consultants and understanding what they offer at the table (external negotiation)

What This Workshop is Not

This workshop is not about sampling, how to analyze data or methods of statistical analysis.

You will be contacted!

If you are pre-registered, you will soon receive an e-mail from the workshop instructor with details concerning sharing survey instruments as well as information about you that can help customize the workshop.

If you plan to register during the conference, it is our hope that the questionnaires and information provided by the pre-registrants will cover your areas of interest as well as your challenges vis-a-vis questionnaire development.

Looking forward to meeting you all!

Registration
You do not need to register for the Annual SRA Meeting to attend the workshop. Early registration is $250, on site registration is $275. Registration will be handled by the SRA Secretariat at sra@burkinc.com

http://www.sra.org/