An information flow based approach to finding informational relationships between questionnaires

In the research area of questionnaire design, whether a questionnaire is a good design is still a hard question. In this paper, we shed some light on it by borrowing an idea of information integration, which makes use of the notion of information carrying relation. An information flow based approach is therefore proposed to tackle the problem of questionnaire design and find information carrying relations from the perspective of information flow. Based upon a derivation of information flow constraints, this approach looks at two or more questionnaires as conceptual constructs of two data schemata. It helps us find potential informational relationships between questionnaires and reduce redundancies in questionnaire design.