Determining the response format

While developing the specific questions for each section of the questionnaire, it became clear that a decision had to be made about how much leeway to allow the respondents. Survey questions can range from very tightly controlled to very open-ended, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each [BrownBrown2001]. There were essentially two competing factors, in our view. We wanted respondents to be able to give an information that they deemed necessary while at the same time constraining the types of answers that they gave to facilitate future analysis. We were also aware of the fact that as our target audience were people who tend to have many administrative things to juggle, we would need to cover a lot of ground in a very efficient fashion.

In the end, we opted for a very controlled set of questions (yes/no, multiple-choice) with an option of "other" for virtually every question. We also provided a space for comments at the end of each of the major sections of the survey to give respondents a chance to amplify their answers. This proved to be a decision not without some regret, however.