Developing a Questionnaire

Having read of the prevalence of mental health issues amongst university students, some common causes and some pedagogical approaches aimed at alleviating some factors that are within the control of the tutor, it is now time to explore, lightly, the thoughts and experiences of my own students.

Ideally, the way I would prefer to achieve this is by getting a small group, 3 or 4, of my tutees together and we have an informal ‘chat’ based around a few pre-prepared questions. Whilst such a format removes any possibility of contributions being anonymous, the reasons I believe this could be the most helpful approach are:

• students can bounce off of one another – I would expect responses to be slow coming, but the expectation that once a response has been shared others would follow, perhaps agreeing, or offering an alternative experience or perspective,
• I would be in a position to act as a facilitator, as necessary, being able to explain and elaborate upon questions and responses,
• it would allow for me to add follow-up questions, dependent upon what students are able (or willing) to share.

However, because my students are actually now my former students, and they are on different courses to one another (though mostly at LCF), I do not deem it feasible to get such a group together in one place, especially within the limited time available.

The appropriate course of action, then, would be to ask my students to respond to a few questions delivered electronically. One idea I have considered is trying to recreate a group discussion via Padlet, and that would allow students to choose whether to be anonymous or not, and provide the opportunity for them to interact with one-another’s posts – but, knowing my students, and the fact that they would have had no, or limited, interaction with one another since August, I couldn’t expect this to be very successful.

So the best way forward appears to be a survey or questionnaire – two names for the same thing. Well, my reading has informed me otherwise: a questionnaire is comprised of a number of questions, and the results are not ‘aggregated’ into single results, whereas a survey is designed to offer conclusions to questions (Bell and Waters 2018, p. 188), or to think of it another way, individual questionnaires provide information about the individual respondents whilst surveys provide an overview of a wider population.

A questionnaire must have focus, and not include extraneous questions. Continuing to concentrate only on areas where a tutor has influence, I would like to ascertain whether my students relate to the causes and experiences expounded in my reading, and also to see if levels of anxiety vary through the duration of the course, and particularly if there are any identifiable ‘peaks’. Essentially, I’d like to see how well I am doing my job! I also believe that it is vital to keep the questionnaire short and simple.

After reflection (and a little help from claude.ai), I decided upon a set of five questions. I opted to use Google Forms, and the final result can be viewed here: https://forms.gle/8mUZNjTa4AQ4ESe77. Please note this is the live version. I notified the students via an email in which I set out the context and purpose of the questionnaire and explained how the data would be used and who would be able to view it:

Hi Everyone
I do hope you are all doing well. The summer feels like it was a long time ago, and the weather has certainly changed!
I'm writing to you because I would like your help with a research project I am doing. This is part of my PG Certificate Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication at UAL.
My research question is: How can tutors engage with Pre-sessional Students in a manner that is unlikely to induce unnecessary anxiety?, and I am exploring factors that may make the Pre-sessional English course more stressful or less stressful for students. I have done a lot of reading, and learnt a lot that I hope will benefit my students in the future. The final information I need is from you! I have designed a short questionnaire consisting of 5 questions, and should take less than 10 minutes for you to complete.

You may be thinking, "will you know who I am?". Your anonymity is very important. You are not asked to give your name, or any other personal data, and it will not be possible to identify you from the 5 questions. There is an extra 'question' where you can type any other information that you may want to share, so if you do choose to add something here, be careful not to include information that could identify you.
And you may be thinking, "how is the data going to be used?". The first thing I want to see is whether what you think is the same as what other researchers (not at UAL) have found. I also want to see if there are things I need to do differently in order to help students deal with the stresses of a very fast-paced course. The 'raw data' will not be shared with anyone else, but a summary of what I discover will be shared with my course tutors and other PG Cert students (all UAL staff), and with my colleagues in the Pre-sessional team. After a couple of months the data will be deleted.
The questionnaire can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQjDKiist5sJ2SVKwnjitl-UM2ENqI7ZMqJUCFYvxUt6vNRg/viewform?usp=header
This is on Google. If you have a Google account, please don't be logged into your account when you access the questionnaire, or it may record your email address.
Read the questions and instructions carefully - different questions are answered in different ways. Once you have completed the 5 questions (and perhaps typed some extra information), you need to click the 'Submit' button at the bottom of the page. If you have not answered any questions correctly, it will not work - questions with a problem will have some information for you to read in red.
If you have any problems, please feel free to email me for help. Please complete the questionnaire by Friday 20th December.
Thank you in advance; your help with my research is very much appreciated. And feel free to email me just to say 'hello', and let me know how your studies are going.
Kind regards
Andrew

Now, sit back and hope for a few responses.