Research Methods in Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management

5.4.3 Wording questions and laying out a questionnaire

The content of your questionnaire is obviously governed by the nature of the survey,

but there are many potential problems in the communication of the questions. These

types of problem apply to all surveys.

Illustration 5.3 An example of a questionnaire used for a street survey

‘How is consumer behaviour towards discount promotions affecting

restaurant organisations?’ by Lauren Read, BSc (Hons) International

Hospitality Management, supervised by Christina Kelly, Plymouth

University.

Method

The method chosen for data collection for this research was

questionnaires, as seen in appendix A. Questionnaires were chosen as this

was in likeness to the method used in the majority of the secondary data

researched as part of the literature review and can be seen in research

conducted by Lee and Lee (2012), Ong (2015) and Santini et al. (2015).

The questionnaire was designed with the questions linking in with the

literature review, theory and concepts. It is said that to measure the

concepts of the research, ‘it is necessary to have an indicator or indicators

that will stand for the concept’ (Bryman and Bell, 2015: 164). This can

be done through questions as part of a self-completion questionnaire and

the questions could be related to the respondent’s description of an

attitude or their behaviour (Bryman and Bell, 2015).

The questionnaire’s introduction informed respondents that their data

would be confidential, this being in line with ethical research. The

questionnaire was devised with 17 questions with a mixture of closed and

open types and in line with previous secondary research conducted. The

questions which related to dining out and the use of discount promotions

were asked as a generalisation around dining out and not about a

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