Data management

This pilot survey was planned to gather preliminary information over a number of households. Looking back it can now be seen that, whilst valuable information was obtained that enabled further research studies to be planned, attempts were made to collect too much detail. Indeed, it is now appreciated that it would have been better to have simplified the questionnaire and designed it in such a way that the data could have been extracted and entered directly from the questionnaire forms into the computer.

We hope that by including this questionnaire in the form that it was used will be instructive in alerting others to the types of problems that can be encountered. One of the questions at the end of this case study is to redesign the questionnaire in a form that will provide answers to the important questions and allow easy data entry without further manipulation.

This case study provides a valuable lesson into the need for careful questionnaire design in relation to the way that information is collected and handled.