The Use of Q-Bank to Learn about Standardized Questions

Questions from survey questionnaires and other standardized forms are a vital tool professionals use to understand the needs of the community. Questionnaire designers devote great effort to testing survey questions to ensure they are reliable and valid. They use a variety of methods to evaluate survey questions.  The Q-Bank application serves as a central repository for evaluated questions contained in question evaluation reports from several participating government agencies. This avoids “reinventing the wheel" each time a question or set of questions is developed. Question designers can search the Q-Bank database to see if similar questions had been evaluated before and whether useful findings or recommendations have already been documented. The methodological details from Q-Bank reports allow users to evaluate findings and the rationales from these previous question evaluation reports.  The development of Q-Bank has also led to a standardized vocabulary that helps advance the practice of questionnaire design and survey methodology. The standardized terminologies make the methodology apparent to professionals from a variety of fields and allows people to evaluate what characteristics of questions cause recurring problems across investigators, institutions, or different testing methodologies.  Although the evaluation reports in Q-Bank were primarily written about questions from population based surveys, the findings from Q-Bank reports will have application to other standardized forms commonly used in public health settings.  Hence, Q-Bank can serve as a resource for many public health professionals who are faced with the task of writing standardized questions on a variety of forms.