IGNOU Project Questionnaire Sample: What the Official Handbooks Require

The official position

What does IGNOU officially require in a project questionnaire?

Two documents settle this question, and they say different amounts. The Common Prospectus is the university-wide document, and it is silent: a search of the July 2026 edition returns no mention of questionnaires, interview schedules, data collection or pilot testing. That silence is meaningful rather than an oversight. Tool design sits with the school that runs the programme, which is why the specification a learner needs is in the project manual issued with the study material and not in any general circular.

The second document is where the substance lives. The School of Education handbook for MES-049 Project Work, available free on eGyanKosh, treats the questionnaire as one of five families of data gathering tools, alongside psychological tests, observation, interview and sociometric techniques. It defines a questionnaire as a series of questions on the problem being investigated, administered either in person or by post, and it states plainly that the purpose must be explained and directions given to respondents before they answer. That handbook was written for one programme, but the research vocabulary it uses is the vocabulary evaluators across schools apply.

On the report side, the MMPP-001 project guidelines list the sections a final report must carry and name the questionnaire used within the annexures. The general rules that surround this are covered in the site guide to IGNOU project guidelines, while the chapter architecture the questionnaire eventually feeds is set out in the IGNOU project report format guide.

Question types

Closed-ended or open-ended, and what each one costs later

The handbook divides questions into two types. Closed-ended questions restrict the respondent to fixed responses: yes or no, a tick against one option in a list, a ranking of alternatives, or a circle on a scale. Open-ended questions are unstructured and invite a free response in the respondent’s own words.

Both are permitted, and a questionnaire may contain one type or both. The decision is not stylistic. Closed items produce counts that can be tabulated and turned into percentages quickly, which is why most IGNOU project reports lean on them. Open items produce richer material but have to be read, coded into themes and summarised before they can appear in a table, and a learner who collects two hundred open responses without a coding plan usually cannot finish the analysis in the time left.

Drafting rules

The drafting rules an IGNOU handbook actually lists

Most advice on this topic online is generic survey writing. The MES-049 handbook is more specific, and it sets out a numbered set of precision rules for framing items. They are worth following literally, because they map onto the exact faults an evaluator notices.

1. Define terms that could be read two ways. Asking what work someone did in a given year invites several different readings, so the term has to be pinned down.
2. Avoid adjectives and adverbs with no agreed meaning. Words such as rarely, occasionally, scarcely and hardly mean different frequencies to different respondents.
3. Avoid double negatives. A sentence built on two negatives should be rewritten as a positive condition.
4. Split double-barrelled questions. An item that asks about two properties at once cannot be answered cleanly, so it becomes two items.
5. Do not offer inadequate alternatives. A yes or no employment question that ignores the nature of employment forces respondents into the wrong box.
6. Underline a word when emphasis is intended. The emphasis has to be visible on the page, not implied.
7. Give a point of reference for any rating or comparison. Warm or cool compared with what, is a question the respondent should not have to guess.
8. Phrase items so they suit every respondent. A question about monthly counselling attendance does not fit learners whose programme runs intensive sessions instead.
9. Design for a complete response. Asking whether someone watches television reveals nothing about viewing habits.
10. Qualify responses systematically. Where alternatives are ranked, attach weights in a consistent order, for example three, two and one across a three point scale.
11. Match items to the respondent’s background. An item that assumes knowledge the respondent does not have produces a guess, not data.

Alongside these, the handbook lists what a good questionnaire looks like as a whole. Items should be socially acceptable so respondents are not offended. Leading questions, which invite the agreement the researcher wants, are to be avoided. Each item should carry a single idea and a single reference. Items should run from general to specific, which helps the respondent organise their own thinking. The instrument should not be so long that respondents lose interest. And the draft should be shown to a few experts for comment and revised in the light of what they say, which for an IGNOU learner means the supervisor named on the approved synopsis.

Not the same tool

A questionnaire, a checklist and an attitude scale are three different instruments

Learners routinely describe a checklist or an attitude scale in the methodology and then call it a questionnaire. The handbook treats them separately, and each has its own construction and testing route. Naming the tool correctly costs nothing and reads as competence.

The last column is where the confusion becomes expensive. A learner who builds a Likert style agreement scale has built an attitude scale, and the handbook’s procedure for that instrument involves a large trial group and item selection by statistical value, followed by a split half reliability estimate. A learner who simply needs to know how often something happens should build a straightforward questionnaire and avoid inheriting a procedure meant for something else.

Before the real sample

How a draft tool is tested before data collection begins

The handbook’s chapter on test development gives the sequence in four steps: planning, preliminary draft, tryout, and final draft. Three details in it are useful to any project learner, whatever the programme.

• Write about twice as many items as the final instrument needs. Weak items are removed at review, and starting with a surplus means the final tool is a selection rather than everything that was thought of.
• Run a small group tryout first. A handful of respondents will expose wording that reads clearly to the writer and confusingly to everyone else.
• Then try the draft on a larger group, in the region of thirty respondents, to check whether the items are understood and the language works before the full sample is approached.

Two cautions belong with this. The thirty figure is the handbook’s guidance for trying out a test instrument, and the two hundred figure is for standardising an attitude scale. Neither is a required project sample size, and neither should be presented as one. Sample size for the study itself is a separate decision that belongs in the approved proposal.

The handbook is also candid about what a questionnaire cannot do. It cannot be administered to respondents who cannot read, or to young children. Postal administration commonly returns a poor response rate. And respondents sometimes do not write what they actually mean. A methodology section that names these limits is stronger than one that pretends they do not exist.

Honest gaps

What IGNOU does not specify, and what settles it instead

Several figures circulate online as though they were university rules. They are not, and stating that clearly is more useful than repeating them.

• There is no university-wide questionnaire template. No official sample instrument is issued for all programmes.
• There is no prescribed number of questions. The handbook says only that the instrument should not be so long that respondents disengage.
• There is no university-wide sample size. The thirty and two hundred figures belong to tool testing and scale standardisation respectively.
• Pilot testing is not mandated by the Common Prospectus. It is good practice described in a school handbook, and several programme manuals ask for it directly.

What settles each of these is the project manual issued with the study material for the specific course code, supplemented by written instructions from the Regional Centre or programme coordinator. Learners who are unsure which code governs their project can check the IGNOU project course codes directory and then read that code’s manual on the official IGNOU website before drafting anything.

Avoidable faults

What makes a questionnaire unusable at the analysis stage

• Items that answer no approved objective. The approved proposal is bound into the report, so an evaluator can see the mismatch immediately.
• Changing the tool after approval without saying so. Official guidance is explicit that a report submitted without an approved synopsis is not evaluated, and the report is read against what was approved.
• Scales with no reference point. Agreement ratings that do not say agreement with what produce numbers that cannot be interpreted.
• Open items collected in bulk with no coding plan. Two hundred paragraphs of text with no scheme for reducing them will stall the analysis chapter.
• No blank copy in the annexures. The MMPP-001 guidelines name the questionnaire used among the annexures of the final report, and a survey based study without its instrument looks unverifiable.
• A stapled rather than bound proposal. The same guidelines state that the approved proposal must be properly bound into the project, and that a project with a stapled proposal is not accepted.

Once the tool is settled and the data is in, the remaining steps are covered in the IGNOU project submission guide.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions