Questionnaires

• What is a questionnaire?

  a form of gathering data that includes asking respondents to provide answers to pre-set questions
• What are the ethical advantages of a questionnaire?

  they are the most ethical as respondents are under no obligation to respond
• Theoretical advantage of a questionnaire (1)

  less likely for the 'Hawthorne Effect' to take place, as the researcher is not present
• Theoretical advantage of a questionnaire?(2)

  
  

  Detached and unbiased as the researcher's personal involvement is kept to the minimum
• Theoretical advantage of questionnaires (3)

  Useful for testing hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between different variables
• Practical advantages of questionnaires (1)

  They are a quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data
• Practical advantage of questionnaire (2)

  Close-ended questions can be processed quickly to reveal relationships between variables; the data is easy to quantify
• Theoretical disadvantages of questionnaires (1)

  A low response rate will affect the representativeness. Hite sent 100,000 people her questionnaire about 'love, passion, and emotional violence' in America, but only 4.5% of people responded
• Theoretical disadvantages of a questionnaire (2)

  Inflexible, meaning you can't develop the respondent's answers.
• What does Cicourel argue about questionnaires

  He argues that questionnaires lack validity as they do not give the true picture of what has been studied
• What is 'right answerism'


  respondents may lie, forget, not know, not understand, or try to please the researcher when completing the questionnaire
• Practical disadvantages of questionnaires (1)

  data tends to be limited and superficial
• Practical disadvantages of questionnaires (2)

  Participants are unlikely to complete a questionnaire if it is long and time-consuming, limiting the amount of information that can be gathered
• Practical disadvantages of questionnaires (3)

  you cannot confirm if questionnaire was completed by the person to whom it was addressed to or if they even received it
• Do interpretivists or positivists prefer questionnaires

  positivists prefer questionnaires as they involve close-ended questions that can reveal a cause-and-effect relationship