Questionnaires

• Questionnaires - practical advantages

  • Quick and cheap
  • Easy to get data from large amounts of people
  • No need to recruit and train interviewers or observers
  • Easier to quantify
• Questionnaires - reliability

  • it's a fixed yardstick that can be used by any researcher to obtain the same results
  • meaning one researcher's study can be repeated and checked by another
  • Also means that if we find differences between answers, that it is a result of real differences between the respondents
  • this allows for comparison and discussing to be deepened
• Questionnaires - Detachment and objectivity

  • sociologist’s personal involvement with their respondents is kept to a minimum
• Questionnaires - Repetitiveness

  • because they can collect information from a large number of people, the results stand a better chance of being fully representative of the wider population
  • they also allow for us to make accurate generalisation about the wider population
• Questionnaires - Ethically right

  • despite some questionnaires posing sensitive questions to respondents, they choose to answer them, making them less pressured than interviews
  • meaning they're more likely to respond with accurate answers
• Questionnaires - practical problems

  • info is limited and superficial because they need to be fairly brief in order to generate responses
  • despite being cheap to make, you may need to offer incentives for being to want to complete them, raising the amount spent.
• Questionnaires - Low response rate

  • few of those who receive a questionnaire bother to complete and return it
  • busy employed people are less likely to respond then unemployed or socially isolated people, which creates a skewed response that isn’t representative.
• Questionnaires - inflexibility

  • once its been finalised, the researcher cannot change the question they have decided to ask
  • unlike unstructured interviews, where the sociologist can develop and ask new questions if they seem relevant.
• Questionnaires - works as snapshots

  • they give a picture of reality at only one moment in time, they fail to produce a fully valid picture because they do not capture the way people's attitudes and behaviour change.
• Questionnaires - Lying, forgetting and 'right answerism'

  • problems of validity are created when respondents give answers that are not full or frank
  • respondents may lie, forget, not know, not understand, or try to please the researcher
  • puts questionnaires at a disadvantage compared to ace to face methods like observations.