Plan estratégico

The questionnaire was designed to elicit initial information from teachers with reference to their use of texts in school, their recommendations to pupils for private reading, their own reading and their perceptions of quality in fiction for the 11- 16 year old age group. It is of great importance to pilot a questionnaire before administering it. Not only does the researcher need to consider the value and impact of the questions, but it is also important to consider how the resulting data may be coded. Within these broad requirements the researcher must be cognisant of key areas; Sapsford and Jupp (1996) list five potentially problematic areas.

Firstly: the question wording. Is the language chosen for the question appropriate and is the meaning of each question unambiguous in its sense? Will prompts be required?

Secondly: Is an open-ended question broad enough in its remit to allow exploration but not so far-ranging that the respondent will be unable to provide a response relating to a wide range of possibilities? What has the researcher done to limit the range of possibilities without shutting them down? Are there particular points of vocabulary which may prompt alternative interpretations from those sought for the purposes of the research?

126 Thirdly: the time taken for the questionnaire. Any researcher must remember the circumstances under which respondents will be completing the questionnaire. In many cases, respondents will be doing this voluntarily and the outcomes of the questionnaire may not impact directly on them unless the information being sought is of a directly personal nature such as a pre-operation health questionnaire. Whilst respondents may have volunteered to complete the questionnaire for valid research in which they have evinced an interest, a questionnaire which occupies too much time to complete and asks overly challenging questions may not yield valid or reliable information if the respondent loses interest or rushes the responses (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000). The researcher will have no control over this if the questionnaire is completed) at a distance. Thus comprehensibility and time taken for completion needs to be checked at the piloting stage (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000).

Fourthly: it is important to include questions which will allow coding of respondents in meaningful ways, age, gender, experience for example. In the point below we note that it is also important to situate these questions thoughtfully. There seemed no objection to the factual questions on the first page of the questionnaire; indeed the anonymous nature of the design meant there could be no breach of confidentiality. In the survey some respondents chose not to answer all questions.

Fifthly: the order of the questions in the questionnaire. This is complex and crucial in order to sustain interest in the respondent. It does not relate merely to the order of the information seeking questions but also to relatively straightforward information questions which will define the respondent (age, gender and so on) but may be of little interest to the respondent who knows these details already. It may be that such questions are a way or warming the respondent up and may be put at the start; alternatively maybe they should go at the end to be completed more rapidly as the respondent reaches the end of the questionnaire.

127 Following on from where to put the information questions, is the more challenging issue of how to order the open-ended questions directly related to the research. The order will stem from what it is essential to ask. However in an open-ended questionnaire some of the logic in the order of the questions could potentially arise from the researcher’s perception of potential answers and might inhibit the thinking or responses of the respondent (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000).

My original questionnaire design raised a number of issues which directly relate to the five categories identified above. Initially I designed a questionnaire without a preamble describing the purpose of the research; I intended this information to go on a separate sheet in order not to distract the respondent once embarked on completion of the questionnaire. However, on reflection, there seemed no need to separate the purpose and in the pilot I included this information at the top of the sheet.

The next issue was one of the wording of the questionnaire title. Originally I chose Teenage Reading Questionnaire. However the use of Teenage/ Young Adult as a nomenclature for the focus of this research is one which has been explored earlier in this dissertation. Since the actual questionnaire was for teachers in school it seemed better to use the word Students to link the questionnaire directly to those the respondents taught.

I chose to put the key information about the respondents next and did not change this order from the original design to the pilot. I felt that this information would provide an easy opening to the completion of the questionnaire. In the pilot the required information led the respondents into the next page: again a signal that the questionnaire might not be excessively time consuming. Indeed the questionnaire was deliberately designed to only occupy four sides of A4.

In order to discriminate between respondents I asked for information relating to gender and teaching experience rather than age. The teaching experience requested was narrowed down in the pilot to length of teaching, teacher role and year groups taught between 7 and 11, linking with the focus of the research on the reading of Young Adults between 11 and 16. I took out the reference to the

128 type of school (grammar, comprehensive, independent) in the pilot. However teachers gave this information so I returned the question about school type in the final version of the questionnaire. I also added a question about the teacher’s original degree: this in itself was potentially informative about where the teacher’s own experience might be located in terms of the literary canon, although it would not show the extent to which the teacher had embraced degree experiences or rejected them.

In terms of the order of questions my original questionnaire design began by exploring the teacher’s own book choices before those of choices for pupils in school. As I developed the pilot for the questionnaires it seemed that asking the teachers about their own book preferences might alter their focus when it came to books for students. Therefore I put the teachers’ criteria for books chosen for students first and, to embed the idea of the link between books chosen and the curriculum, linking to the focus in my own research to official pronouncements on quality in official documents, (NC (2008). I deliberately moved from criteria teachers would look for in a book to asking for the names of actual texts for use in class followed by texts teachers might recommend for independent reading.

Although the crux of my research is about quality I asked for open-ended definitions of quality after the book recommendations and just before a final question on their own reading choices. In a sense I hoped that the sandwiching of quality definitions between book recommendations and their own reading choices would provide a type of triangulation. I was aware throughout of Cohen, Manion and Morrison’s (2000) caveat that open-ended questions are a constraint because they take time to complete; however I did not think that there would be a problem with teachers articulating their thoughts on paper (p.256) which can also be a contra-indication for the use of open-ended questions.

Discussion with those who completed the pilot questionnaire indicated that it was important to have a font that was clear and large enough to read at speed. It was also important to leave enough room in the boxes, for book titles for example, for teachers to write in these with some ease. In order to create a questionnaire with user–friendly font size and layout, it did mean that it would also be four sides of

129 A4. This is long for a questionnaire but, again in order to render it accessible to the user, I took the decision to print four individual and stapled pages, rather than back to back. This did mean that returns of the questionnaires had responses on all pages, if not to all questions.