questionnaire

• practical advantages 

  • one practical strength of questionnaires = quick + cheap way of gathering large amounts of data from people geographically widely spread 
  • eg Connor + Dewson posted 4000 questionnaires at 14 higher education institutions when examining factors that prevent working class from going to university
  • supports the researcher to gather larger sample size. allows the study to be more representative of the general target population. therefore, the method could be more preferred above other methods, eg unstructured interviews
  • however, despite the ability to gather larger sums of data, a weakness of questionnaires is that it has a lower response rate. this is because questionnaires rely on the participant to be filled out and completed, and it needs to be sent back to them. if the participant loses the questionnaire, the researcher will have less data to base their study from. as a result, lowering validity
• theoretical strength

  • questionnaires are highly reliable
  • because questionnaires are standardised: same questions asked, same choice of answers, same order
  • means that the questionnaire can be made identically to the original one, allowing the researcher to get the same findings from using the same standard format as the original study used. positivists would prefer this method because it gathers quantitative data which is easy to analyse and compare
  • however, questionnaires only provide a slight picture of the social reality at the time of the study. this means that the researcher cannot capture changes in attitudes over time. therefore, when repeated by another researcher, social attitude changes may cause different results. this could cause questionnaires to be less reliable.
• inflexibility

  • one disadvantage = this method is not flexible
  • once it has been finalised, the researcher is stuck with the questions they have decided to ask
  • this means that they cannot explore new areas and ideas of interest they have had as the forms sent to the respondent can’t be recovered (postal questionnaires) or edited (online). this can make other methods more preferred because they have increased flexibility. for example, unstructured interviews, which can also give more in-depth data due to the freedom of probing the interviewee’s ideas 
  • however, if the researcher fully plans what they aim to study before finalising the questionnaire, then inflexibility is not an issue. this is because changes eg adding questions can be done during the process of typing it up, which is also inexpensive and efficient to do so.
• theoretical weakness

  • questionnaires have low validity 
  • this is because the method depends on the respondent’s willingness and ability to provide full and accurate answers
  • this could cause lower validity if the participant lies, forgets, or misunderstands, meaning that potentially inaccurate responses are collected from this method. this could create the risk that the researcher doesn’t measure what they intend to, since they have collected false and untruthful data. this means that a less meaningful conclusion can be drawn, which could make this method less preferred opposed to others, eg unstructured interviews, which gathers in-sightful data to allow more meaningful conclusions.
  • however, a practical strength of the data produced by questionnaires is that it takes much less time to quantify. this is because they can be processed quickly by computers, particularly where pre-coded and closed-ended questions are used