Automating Questionnaire Design and Construction

Abstract

When devising survey questionnaires it is often useful to reuse questions and other questionnaire objects from previous, similar surveys. The notion of reuse leads us to consider the creation of searchable libraries of standard questions. However, a major problem is how to represent routing and specialisation information in a question outside the scope of the original questionnaire. This paper describes a set of representations and methods that have been conceived to aid in the construction of libraries of standard questions and other questionnaire components. The computational inspiration behind these arose in work on object orientation and reusable components. The library components contain embedded knowledge of particular survey domains and our method simplifies the management of that knowledge. This paper introduces the notion of context tokens to provide a mechanism for encapsulating knowledge about the applicability of individual question objects. In so doing, context tokens form flexible links between the stock questions which may be used to direct the construction of questionnaires. Furthermore, they ensure that the questionnaires constructed are well organised and that the conditional routing paths within them are both complete and correct.