Inquiry data is collected to understand participants’ knowledge, values, beliefs, experiences, feelings, opinions, attitudes, or perceptions. This information provides insights into the effectiveness of a strategy, offering feedback and improvement suggestions.
Inquiry data can be collected through:
- Surveys
- Verbally through interviews and focus groups
Important:
Using interviews and focus groups requires a full ethics review process, not just an expedited ethics (QI) review process.
Inquiry data helps to answer the ‘why’ questions in your study by providing your participants’ assessment of the effectiveness of the strategy. This allows for a more thorough understanding of the reasons the strategy was successful or unsuccessful.
Advantages
- Participants have the opportunity to provide detailed feedback
- Researcher can shift focus based on participants’ comments
- Researcher can ask questions
Disadvantages
- Interviewing, transcribing, and analyzing interviews is very time-consuming
- Need to have effective interview and/or facilitation skills
Interactive Book
Inquiry Methods of Data Collection
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Creating Clear Questions for Inquiry Data
There are no real hard and fast rules about how to write strong questions, but rather a set of guidelines. Here are some tips to avoid common problems you might run into. (Neuman & Robson, 2012).
- Emphasize clarity by avoiding ambiguous language, jargon, and abbreviations.
- Tailor vocabulary to respondents’ understanding, ensuring precision and avoiding multiple ideas in one question.
- Maintain emotional neutrality and prestige awareness to prevent bias.
- Eliminate double-barreled questions, differentiate beliefs from reality, and guard against leading questions.
- Assess respondents’ capability, avoiding questions beyond their knowledge. Address timeframe sensibly, focusing on current attitudes.
- Ensure grammatical correctness, eliminate double negatives, and create balanced response categories.
- Mitigate social desirability bias by framing questions to reduce socially desirable answers. Providing face-saving alternatives and considering survey delivery impact can enhance response reliability.
Creating good survey questions takes practice. Now that you are aware of some of the pitfalls of creating survey questions, take a look at the following problem examples and possible improvements.
| Problems to Avoid | Example of Problem | Possible Improvement |
| False premises | When was the last time you consumed non-prescription drugs? | Have you ever consumed non-prescription drugs? |
| Distant future intentions | After you graduate from college and gain employment in your field do you feel you would continue to work in that field until you retire? | Based on your current studies do you feel that you would pursue employment in that field of study? |
| Social desirability bias | Do you give to charity? | How often do you give to charity?
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