Survey Research in Technical Communication: Designing and Administering Questionnaires

<p>Survey research can help inform technical communicators about the decisions they make in their professional or academic lives. This paper introduces the complex process of survey research to researchers and research consumers in technical communication, focusing specifically on the questionnaire method. Survey research includes several important steps: • Defining research questions • Sampling the population • Administering the questionnaire • Constructing questions • Testing the questionnaire • Measuring reliability and validity • Analyzing the data • Evaluating the survey. This paper discusses these steps and reviews relevant literature relating to questionnaire design. From this review, readers will become better consumers of survey research and be on their way to conducting their own surveys with additional reading in sampling and statistics.</p>