Purposes and Formats of Questions
Much of the information in this section was gleaned from Michael Quinn Patton's "Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods" book.
Types of Information Collected by Questions
Questions are geared to find out what people know, did, feel and think.1. To find out what information they know, ask them to describe something, e.g., "Please describe ..."
2. To find out what they feel, ask them, e.g., "How do you feel about ...?" or "How did you feel when ...?"
3. To find out what they think, ask them for their opinion on something, e.g., "How could the .. be improved?"
4. To find out what they did, ask them to describe an activity they did.
Two Types of Questions
1. Open-ended:No options are provided for the respondent to answer the question. They must think of their own response and describe it in their own words. If respondents have and take the time to reflect on answers to the question, you can get more meaningful information than from closed questions.
2. Closed:
The respondent is given a set of alternative choices from which he or she can choose to answer the question, i.e., "yes," "no," multiple choice, a rating, ranking, etc. Closed questions can usually be answered quickly, allowing you to get a get a lot of information quickly. However, respondents may rush through the questions and not take enough time to think about their answers. Your choices may not include the answer they prefer.
How you configure your questions together, depends on whether they're used in questionnaires, interviews or focus groups.
For the Category of Evaluations (Many Kinds):
Related Library Topics
Recommended Books
General Information (Applying to Many Types Evaluation)
The following books are recommended because of their highly practical nature and often because they include a wide range of information about this Library topic. To get more information about each book, just hover your cursor over the image of the book. A "bubble" of information will be displayed. You can click on the title of the book in that bubble to get more information, too.
Field
Guide to Nonprofit Program Design, Marketing and Evaluation
- by Carter McNamara, published by Authenticity Consulting, LLC. There are few books, if any, that explain how to carefully plan, organize, develop and evaluate a nonprofit program. Also, too many books completely separate the highly integrated activities of planning, marketing and evaluating programs. This book integrates all three into a comprehensive, straightforward approach that anyone can follow in order to provide high-quality programs with strong appeal to funders. Includes many online forms that can be downloaded. Many materials in this Library topic are adapted from this book.
Also see
For evaluating employees, Supervision -- Recommended Books
For evaluating nonprofit programs, Program Management -- Recommended Books
