I did try and fill in your questionnaire but found it to contain a number of issues. Firstly you need to check it thoroughly for spelling and grammatical errors. It looks as if you have added a short explanation to one of the questions, concerning a table of characteristics of electric vehicles, that reads particularly badly as even you don’t seem to quite understand what you are trying to say! The main point I would make is that your questionnaire contains a number of double assumptive questions. That is to say that the question assumes a pre-condition to a circumstance. An “if this - then that” style of question. Asking me, for example, if I had fibre broadband would I watch more online films gives very little insight into opinion or behaviour. Answers to such questions are notoriously unreliable. There are some other issues of design and layout. There appear to be a number of irrelevant questions, each question should build to answering the research question. Whilst I cannot comment in detail it would appear this is a little unfocused and a rather general data trawl. Also you ask for qualification data (age, sex etc) at the front end, this is where you should normally ask your most important questions whilst the respondent is fresh and engaged, and can then plod through the boring routine bits at the end. Please take my comments as supportive and positive. Well done on having a go and I wish you so ccess with your project.

It certainly didn't give the opportunity to indicate where present and planned EV's are simply not suitable for some people.

A question about average daily mileage assumes that everyone is a regular commuter - some of us will do about 5 miles/day or 400-600 miles/day, any average being meaningless

I tend to agree with earlier comments. Over the last few years I have been invited to participate in a number of surveys forming part of a dissertation ranging from transport to medical issues. Sadly I have found many vague and badly presented for which I blame the supervisors as much as the students. When I did my degree dissertations came in at MSc level and not BSc but this at BSc level seems an increasing trend resulting in little originality. Sorry I will not be participating!

Edited by RaineMan on 02/03/2018 at 11:37

"It was more a case of being critical of his supervisor and bringing in dissertations at the first degree stage where anything is unilkely to be original."

I'm not sure what is meant by this. Are you objecting to dissertations at first degree stage? If so, there may be an issue with the term "dissertation", which may range from a substantial PhD thesis to a small research project, as here. (Or maybe this is part of a bigger project.)

Also, the researcher describes his research (unhelpfully) as part of an undergraduate/postgraduate project, so we don't know if it's first-degree stage anyway.

Finally, from my personal experience of post-graduate research (i.e. at the levels of master's and post-master's research - MPhil/PhD) I am clear that the supervisor's role is not to guide the detail of a research project. The student is expected to function autonomously. He may well eventually be subject to criticism and/or poor marks for any errors of expression, intellectually suspect ideas, weakly constructed research processes and so on. Supervision sessions, where work in progress is discussed, should bring problems to the surface before a crucial point is reached, of course. But we don't know what stage the research in question is at.

So I think it's unfair to criticise the supervisor. As for criticising the student, I suggest we all try to be helpful. Certainly, if I was looking over his work (and I do support lower-level students) I would be pointing out poor expression and other intellectual issues with the logic of the questions, how well the topic was being addressed and so on. But I would be supportive, not destructive.