The Importance of Questionnaires in Corpus Building Process

Abstract

Questionnaires are the most commonly used instruments in collecting data. This method is also accessible for doing research investigations. Questionnaires can also be a key factor in searching for a reliable source to build a corpus for specific purposes. Thus, specialists’ aid is a prerequisite in searching for scientific articles, specialized books and web pages in the corpus compilation process. In order to realize this, required questions need to be prepared. In this procedure, studying practitioners’ needs was the pivotal factor in conducting a survey using questionnaire. Taking their prevalence into account, it can be supposed that questionnaires are easy to create, design and use. However, it should be mentioned that in order to obtain expected results, the formation and sketching questionnaires requires time and careful consideration. This article presents the process of designing questionnaires based on certain criteria, the analysis of each developed question, and the active words that are used in the Oil and Gas industry taken from the practitioners have been input into the sketchengine.eu tool, useful webpages have been found. In this way, the size of the corpus has been enlarged. A developed online questionnaire has been surveyed among 331 practitioners, collected data has been analyzed, and further recommendations have been suggested.