Questionnaire aims

Before writing your questionnaire, make sure you know what you want to find out.

Come up with a hypothesis - a prediction of what you think the survey will show. After completing the survey, look at the results to see if they agree with your original hypothesis [hypothesis: an assumption one might make which can be tested by further investigation ].

Here are some examples of a questionnaire hypothesis:

• everybody under 20 years old owns a mobile phone
• only young people watch digital TV
• only 5 per cent of households recycle rubbish

You also need to know how the survey results will help you. There's no point in collecting vast amounts of information if it's not relevant to your aim.

The best use of a questionnaire is to collect information that is not available elsewhere as a secondary resource. This could be:

• people's views and opinions
• statistics about a very specific subject that hasn't already been researched, eg the number of homes in your street with digital TV or the number of students in your school who own mp3 players