Developing and facilitating questionnaires

To create community conversations in order to collect information from community members about needs, wants, and preferences, utilize the tips and suggestions in Developing and Facilitating Questionnaires (PDF), also provided as text below.

Purpose

• Questionnaires are a great way to survey the needs, interests, and preferences of older adults. They can also be used to assess the usability or ‘age-friendliness’ of a space or community.
• The benefit of using a questionnaire is that you can gain the perspectives of many people at once and the ‘data’ can be easily managed.
• The drawback of using only a questionnaire is that you may miss the rich information that comes from conversations with community members.

Tips and suggestions

• Use and/or adapt the reflective questions in the building blocks as questions.
• For each question, participants can check off a response that best suits their perspective. For example, you can create a five-point scale of ‘very much agree’, ‘agree’, ‘somewhat agree’, ‘disagree’, or ‘not applicable’).
• Think of creative ways to distribute your survey. Perhaps you can connect with a community event that older adults will attend (such as a flu clinic).
• You can use an online survey tool to reach a broader audience. These online tools can also help with ‘analyzing’ the data.
• The Aging Well in Haliburton survey using the eight key features of an age friendly community is a good resource to get started!