Questionnaires

• QUESTIONNAIRES

  An obvious way of gathering data about people is to ask them questions, for example by using written (or self-completion) questionnaires. These can be distributed to people at home and returned by post or in person, e-mailed or completed and collected on the spot. Questionnaires ask respondents (the people who complete them) to provide answers to pre-set questions.
• Types of questions in questionnaires

  • Closed-ended
  • Open-ended
• Closed-ended questions

  Respondents must choose from a limited range of possible answers that the researcher has decided in advance, such as "Yes, 'No' or 'Don't know', rather like multiple-choice questions in an exam. Each possible answer is given a code, enabling researchers to quantity (count) the number of respondents choosing each of the available answers.
• Open-ended questions

  Respondents are free to give whatever answer they wish, in their own words, and without any pre-selected choices being offered by the researcher.
• Advantages of questionnaires

  • Practical advantages
  • Reliability
  • Hypothesis testing
  • Detachment and objectivity
  • Representativeness
  • Ethical issues
• Practical advantages of questionnaires

  • They are a quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numbers of people, widely spread geographically, especially if a postal or online questionnaire is used
  • There is no need to recruit and train interviewers or observers to collect the data, because respondents complete and return the questionnaires themselves
  • The data is usually easy to quantify, particularly where pre-coded, closed-ended questions are used, and can be processed quickly by computer to reveal the relationships between different variables.
• Reliability of questionnaires


  • When the research is repeated, a questionnaire identical to the original one is used, so new respondents are asked exactly the same questions, in the same order, with the same choice of answers, as the original respondents
  • With postal or online questionnaires, unlike with interviews, there is no researcher present's influence on the respondents' answers. Different researchers may obtain the same results from the same respondents.
• Hypothesis testing with questionnaires

  • Questionnaires are particularly useful for testing hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between different variables. Analysis of respondents' answers could show whether there is a correlation between children's achievement levels and family size.
• Detachment and objectivity of questionnaires


  • Postal questionnaires are completed at a distance and move less or no personal contact with respondents. For this reason, positivists see them as a good way of maintaining detachment and objectivity.
• Representativeness of questionnaires


  • Because questionnaires can collect information from a large number of people, the results stand a better chance of being truly representative of the wider population than with other methods that study only very small numbers of people
  • Researchers who use questionnaires tend to pay more attention to the need to obtain a representative sample.
• Ethical issues with questionnaires


  • Questionnaires pose fewer ethical problems than many other research methods. Although questionnaires may ask personal or sensitive questions, respondents are generally under no obligation to answer them
  • Researchers should gain respondent informed consent, guarantee their anonymity and make it clear that they have a right not to answer any of the questions they do not wish to.
• Disadvantages of questionnaires

  • Practical problems
  • Low response rate
  • Inflexibility
  • Questionnaires as snapshots
  • Detachment
  • Lying, forgetting and 'right answerism'
  • Imposing the researcher's meanings
• Practical problems with questionnaires


  • The data from questionnaires tends to be limited and superficial because they need to be fairly brief, since most respondents are unlikely to complete and return a long, time-consuming questionnaire
  • With postal and online questionnaires, the researcher cannot be sure whether the potential respondent has actually received the questionnaire or whether a returned questionnaire was actually completed by the person to whom it was addressed.
• Low response rate of questionnaires


  • Very low response rates can be a major problem, especially with postal questionnaires, because few of those who receive a questionnaire bother to complete and return it
  • The danger with a low response rate is that those who return their questionnaires may be different from those who don't, producing distorted and unrepresentative results.
• Inflexibility of questionnaires


  • Once the questionnaire has been finalised, the researcher is stuck with the questions they have decided to ask and cannot explore new areas of interest should they come up during the research.
• Questionnaires as snapshots


  • Questionnaires give a picture of social reality at only one moment in time: the moment after the respondent answers the questions. They fail to capture the way people's attitudes and behaviour change over time.
• Detachment of questionnaires


  • Questionnaires fail to allow the researcher to get close to the subjects of the study and share their meanings. There is no way to clarify what the questions mean to the respondent or to deal with misunderstandings.
• Lying, forgetting and 'right answerism' in questionnaires


  • Respondents may lie, forget, not know or not understand, or try to please or second-guess the researcher by giving 'respectable' answers they feel they ought to give, rather than tell the truth.
• Imposing the researcher's meanings in questionnaires


  • By choosing which questions to ask, the researcher, not the respondent, has already decided what is important. If we use closed-ended questions, respondents have to try to fit their views into the ones on offer. If we use open-ended questions, the researcher's categories may not match the respondent's categories when coding the data.
• Questionnaires are lists of written questions, usually closed-ended and often posted. They can gather data on large numbers cheaply and quickly.
• Perspectives on questionnaires

  • Positivists favour them because they are reliable and objective
  • Interpretivists claim they lack validity: they are inflexible, superficial snapshots and don't give a true account of respondents' meanings