Some Methodological Aspects of the Design and Evaluation of Questionnaires in Medical Studies

A BSTRACT The development of questionnaires is a key element of epidemiological research to assess data on the practice, attitudes, and knowledge of people, as well as the impact of various factors on an individual. Lack of validated questionnaires can lead to the use of previously designed and suboptimally adapted questionnaires, which can lead to misrepresentation affecting the validity of the study. Designing questionnaires for use in research requires significant effort on the part of the development team to ensure that the quality of the information collected is consistent with the aims and objectives of the research. Like all research, surveys should have clear research questions using as few high-quality, core questions (elements) as possible that will interest the target population. Questionnaire topics should produce reproducible results (reliable) and measure what they are supposed to measure (valid). The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has made significant adjustments to all aspects of the life of the world’s population, including physical, social, emotional, and behavioral well-being. Researchers have felt a lack of validated questionnaires that can assess changes in all aspects of life that are characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides examples of the development of such data collection tools, including those adapted to take into account various social-demographic and cultural factors that affect the behavior, lifestyle, and attitude of a person to a particular phenomenon. The article provides an analysis of domestic and foreign references on the methodology of developing questionnaires that correspond to the goals and needs of the study and provide reliable and useful information for collecting data in various areas of medical science. The paper describes and discusses in detail the areas of application of questionnaires, models, and stages of their development and also considers methods for assessing their validity and reliability. A systematic search for scientific articles on the research topic was carried out in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and e-library databases using keywords related to the questionnaires. The following inclusion criteria were established: full-text articles in English or Russian published in scientific journals in the last 10 years. The presented review of the literature from authoritative databases will be useful for beginning researchers and may help them in the development of questionnaires for conducting epidemiological studies.

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