Tagged: questionnaire

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Asking questions

If you serve a questionnaire on the respondent, or ask them for further details of their response to your claim, send your questions by email if you possibly can. That way, you will make it easier for them to answer your questions in a document that incorporates both questions and answers.

Suppose your questionnaire goes:

6. Please answer the following questions:
(a) Do you accept that I am a disabled person?
(b) Do you agree that I have asked you on numerous occasions to consider adjusting my working hours so that I do not have to travel at busy times?
(c) Do you agree that the nature of my work is such that it is rarely time-critical over short periods?
(d)…
…

If you have just sent a hard copy, their response may well simply go:

(a) No.
(b) Yes.
(c) Not entirely. It is often necessary to have your input on queries that are raised by sales staff within an hour or two.
(d)…
…

This will be extraordinarily annoying to use, because anyone reading it will have to keep flicking back to the questions to find out what the answers mean. It is much better for everyone if questions and answers are interleaved, thus:

(a) Do you accept that I am a disabled person?
Answer: No.
(b) Do you agree that I have asked you on numerous occasions to consider adjusting my working hours so that I do not have to travel at busy times?
Answer: Yes.
(c) Do you agree that the nature of my work is such that it is rarely time-critical over short periods?
Answer: Not entirely. It is often necessary to have your input on queries that are raised by sales staff within an hour or two.

If you email your questions, it is more likely that your respondent will do the sensible thing in replying – because you’ll have saved them the trouble of re-typing all your questions.

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Discrimination questionnaires

One might have thought that the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (or both) would provide copies of all the questionnaires at a single location and in a common format on their websites. They don’t. Instead the questionnaires are to be found – with some difficulty – scattered across various websites, in a variety of layouts, and issued by a number of different bodies and government departments (most of which no longer exist).

We have made the complete collection available here. If the questionnaire you want does not include guidance notes, it is worth reading the guidance to one of the other questionnaires: very similar considerations will arise.

Equal pay questionnaire This is a copy of the Statutory Instrument which includes the questionnaire as schedule 1. No guidance notes are included.

Sex discrimination questionnaire This is an 11-page DTI booklet, which includes guidance notes.

Race discrimination questionnaire This is a 15-page booklet, including guidance notes (issued jointly by the Home Office and the Department for Education and Employment).

Disability questionnaire This is a 43-page pdf booklet produced by the Disability Rights Commission (now replaced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission).

Sexual orientation questionnaire This is a 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.

Religion or belief questionnaire Another 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.

Age questionnaire And another 10-page DTI booklet, including guidance notes.