Practice with these exercises to prepare for your seminars and wider research.

1. For this exercise you will need some questionnaire items, some of which are pre-coded, others closed and others open. Click for some examples. Otherwise, find some structured interview schedules containing such things, by Googling ‘Questionnaire bank’ and following relevant links.
(a) Having chosen a number of items you will need to generate answers to the questions, either by asking them of at least five people or by using your imagination. Now you have some data that you can prepare for quantitative analysis.
(b) Draw up a coding scheme which indicates the variable names and the value labels. Using a square grid of boxes, fill in the values of the data matrix. If you are learning SPSS or some other statistical software package, you can try entering these data and producing some frequency counts.