Zhouxian Li
Introduction
Along with the development of global economy, intensive competitions in employment nowadays have become one of the main issues of graduates from all over the world. More companies pay great attention not only to the graduates’ degree, but to their creativity and talent. Consequently, a growing number of foreign students begin to choose to pursue their further study in the UK in recent years. Nevertheless, Chinese students who compose one of the largest groups of international students at the British universities account for almost one fifth of the 318,000 foreign learners in the Britain in 2004 to 2005 (UKCOSA, 2007). Yet it is very rare for British universities to carry out researches on the learning experience of Chinese students. Therefore, the topic of my self-design questionnaire is acquaintance of Chinese students with study in the UK. This survey makes an attempt to attract the attention of Chinese students so that they can reconsider their current study situation.
The report focuses on evaluating how effectively my questionnaire works and assessing the pilot research based on the feedbacks of respondents. However, considering the size of the questionnaire and the number of respondents that course required, I decided to limit the survey scope to Lancaster University. All ten respondents in my questionnaire, which involves five males and five females, are Chinese students who study at Lancaster University because they ‘have a shared understanding of the topic’ (Foddy 1994).
Layout and Design Principle of Questionnaire
This section will be followed by a description of the layout of my questionnaire and also an explanation of the rationale for designing the questionnaire. There are eleven questions in total on the questionnaire, which involve closed questions and one open question. Gillham (2000) suggests that using different types of questions because it would be extremely boring to answer the same type of questions. Moreover, the questionnaire has divided into three parts, which includes personal information, differences of study experience between the UK and China and learning experience in the UK. The order of question is another factor that I would consider about. People may ‘wish to start with some factual questions, followed by attitudinal ones’ (Oppenheim 1992).
The first part of the questionnaire consists of 4 closed questions of personal information which can be referred to demographic questions. According to Peterson (2000), there are two main reasons for asking demographic questions, one is that they can provide researchers with information of respondents, and another one is that demographic questions often have relation to the following questions through statistical analyses in a questionnaire. Question one is about gender and rest of questions in this part are about respondents’ educational information. For example, question three asks for the major of respondents.
The second part, in general, seeks information about how respondents distinguish between study in China and in the UK by using two types of questions. Question five is the first type of question, which is an attitude question for measuring intensity of respondents. ‘Strength measures can identify respondents who will be more consistent over time as well as more consistent between topics’ (Schuman and Presser 1981; Smith 1983 in Converse et al., 1986, P37). The form of rating scale that I used in this question is the ‘Likert scale’ (Peterson 2000) which is a five-category scale. The categories in question five are from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. Question six, however, is a specific closed question, following by question five, to ask in more details.
The last part of the questionnaire concentrates on Chinese students’ learning experience in the UK by setting up a rating scale (question seven) about the extend of