Dear all,

the Centre for Census and Survey Research (www.ccsr.ac.uk) at the University of Manchester will be running a number of one-day training courses in survey and questionnaire design in November 2011. A small number of places are still available. See www.ccsr.ac.uk/courses/list

The course offers a complete overview of the survey process. There are several key elements in the design of a successful survey, and all of them must be right otherwise the survey might fail. This course considers all of these elements of survey design and management and explores how they fit together and complement one another. The course is taught by a lecturer with hands on experience in delivering surveys across the public and private sector often with hard to reach groups in challenging social policy contexts.

Rubbish in, rubbish out - have you ever discovered too late that your survey questions did not deliver useful or useable data? Through looking at a wide range of pitfalls, this course explores ways to assess the effectiveness of existing questionnaires as well as how to write successful new ones. It combines suggestions from the research literature on questionnaire design with a very practical approach. Common errors in the wording of individual questions are examined as well as how to combine individual questions into a meaningful questionnaire.

Cognitive Interviewing for Testing Survey Questions - 23rd November 2011
This one day course is designed to familiarise participants with this powerful and efficient method of piloting survey questions called Cognitive Interviewing. This is a type of in-depth interviewing which focuses on respondents' thought processing in answering survey questions and uses specialised techniques such as thinking aloud, probing, observation and paraphrasing. The course is about what cognitive interviewing is as well as how to do it. There are practical exercises as well as lecture time.

Standardised Multi-Item Scale Development for Surveys - 24th November 2011
Standardised multi-item scales are very common in psychology, education, and health, but much less so in sociology, political science, and survey research. This one day course is designed to inspire participants from all disciplines that it is possible to develop your own high quality multi-item scales. This course offers an introduction on how to do this: looking at psychometric principles, exploring the special questionnaire design concerns, introducing some basic statistical tools for assessing the reliability and dimensionality of multi-item scales, and practice evaluating some existing scales in a lab session at the end of the day.