There are surprisingly many methods available for launching your questionnaire and the choice made inevitably has consequences for response rates and effective retrieval of information.
The resource Design and use of questionnaires: a review of best practice applicable to surveys of health service staff and patients will help in addressing the issues which concern you most in making your decision. You may decide in the end that a combination of techniques is the ideal approach to optimizing your findings. Have a look here, for example if you wish to compare the pros and cons of using telephone interviewing. (A few of the relevant links are no longer immediately available but please skip along until you find alternatives. There are plenty to choose from!)
Perhaps you are involved in assessing patient satisfaction or the information received by these patients following hospital treatment. You may be in a dilemma as to whether to have the questionnaires posted as paper copies or to request that, for example, registrars interview the patients before discharge. In such circumstances, it is very worthwhile bearing in mind the constraints on time represented by a short research project and to be realistic about patient response rates. The use of postal questionnaires is ideally accompanied with one or more techniques to optimize response rates, including sending reminders or obtaining patient consent prior to sending out the questionnaires (see Optimizing Responses Rates for more comprehensive information in this area). However, such techniques rely on the availability of considerable time for planning and on funding to support the distribution of a high volume of questionnaires. To obtain an overview of the pros and cons of postal surveys, which may inform the discussion section of your report, regardless of your final decision, you should find it helpful to consult the resources available at
and
Postal Surveys and Self-Completion Questionnaires.
Advice on the Pros and Cons of Different Survey Techniques by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
