Questionnaires/Surveys

• Open - having a question that has an open response.
• Closed - having a question where you answer multiple choice questions.
• Postal - a questionnaire/survey that is sent to you through the post.
• Online - a questionnaire/survey that is online. 
• Postal questionnaires advantages - Postal questionnaires are quite cheap and an efficient way to gather lots of information from a large number of people. People responding to the questionnaire may feel like they can answer any of the questions truthfully as the researcher is not there and present as they are doing it. This works really well for personal or sensitive questions.
• Postal questionnaires advantages - Postal questionnaires ask the same identical questions to all of their respondents and when the respondents have different answers to the questions, it shows the differences between the respondents' opinions. Postal questionnaires can be replicated and repeated which means that other researchers can see if their findings are reliable. 
• Postal questionnaires disadvantages - Questions can be misunderstood by the respondent which means that they will answer incorrectly to what they actually believe as the researcher isn’t there to be able to clarify what each question is. Not all respondents will complete the questionnaire or do it at all. 

  The researcher will never know if the person who completed the questionnaire as a group of people could do it, or the wrong person in a household.
• Postal questionnaires disadvantages - Postal questionnaires can be difficult to do and understand for people with literacy problems. The number of people who actually send their replies back to the researcher is usually low compared to the amount of questionnaires that have been distributed.
• Closed questions advantages - Closed questions provide the researcher with quantitative data which allows the researcher to find patterns in different factors. It is easy for the researcher to compare the answers written by the respondents as it was only multiple choice so the respondent wouldn’t have been able to add any extra detail to their answer. 
• Closed questions disadvantages -  Closed questions don’t let the respondents put the detail that they might want to in their answers, this means that they aren’t able to explain why they ticked one box instead of another one.
• Surveys advantages - They gather a lot of quantitative data which will help the researcher to identify patterns and trends easier during their research. Surveys are likely to show a representative picture of society or a particular aspect of social behaviour. Normally surveys include all of the possible variables instead of trying to have a high number of people involved and doing the survey. They can be more cost effective compared to other methods. 
• Surveys disadvantages -  Large amounts of data can be difficult and very time consuming to interpret. Patterns and trends may not be very clear. Having a low response rate can undermine the representativeness of the survey's findings which mean that the patterns and trends appear to be stronger than they actually are. Surveys do not get any depth or detail from the respondent  that the qualitative methods can show. Not everyone will have answered all of the questions correctly/honestly. Not everyone likes being questioned even in a questionnaire so they may not be honest.
• PET: Sending out postal questionnaires would take a lot of time as money because there are a lot of questionnaires/surveys that you would need to send out to your respondents. Ethically you would have to check that the questions on the survey/questionnaire keep the respondents private information, keep confidentiality and keep who filled out the form anonymously.
• PET: The researcher will also need to have the consent of the respondent to fill out the form, but depending on the questions you might need informed consent to send the survey/questionnaire to them. Sending out things like questionnaires and surveys have more reliability and are easier to measure how replicable, and re-testable a piece of research is.  Questionnaires and surveys, especially ones that have open questions are interpretivism as they are interested more in the participants' opinions and feelings rather than the facts.