Questionnaire Template

The safest route to a defensible questionnaire is adaptation, not invention. Find a scale already validated in published research, cite its source, and adapt the wording to your context — then report reliability for your own sample rather than relying on the original authors' figure. Items written from scratch without validation are a weakness examiners reliably identify.

Use at least three or four items per construct so internal consistency can be assessed at all, and keep each item to a single idea. Double-barrelled items asking about two things at once, leading items that signal the expected answer, and negatively worded items with confusing double negatives are the three most common flaws.

Order the questionnaire so it opens with easy, non-threatening questions and places demographics at the end, when respondents are already invested. Pilot it with around thirty people, compute Cronbach's alpha per construct, and revise or drop items that fail to cohere before committing to full data collection. Remember to reverse-code negatively worded items before running any analysis.