4) Questionnaires

• Practical advantages – Dewson: posted nearly 4,000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country in their study of the factors influencing the decisions of the w/c students to go to university.
• Low response rate – Hite’s: study of ‘love, passion and emotional violence’ in America, sent out 100,000 questionnaires, but only 4.5% of them were returned.
• Detachment – Cicourel: argue that data from questionnaires lack validity and does not give a true picture of what has been studied.
• Imposing the researchers meaning – Shipman: when the researcher’s categories are not the respondents’ categories, ‘pruning and bending’ of the data is not inevitable.
• Practical issues – Rutter: used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner London secondary schools. He was able to correlate achievement, attendance, and behaviour with variables such as school size, class size and number of staff. The data provided correlations between variables like class size and achievement, but not explanations for these correlations.