Topic 4: questionnaires

• Advantages

  Practical- Quick, cheap, large amounts of data from a large amount of people, no need to recruit and train interviewers, data is easily quantifiable particularly when using clothes ended questions

  • Reliability- reliable as they can be repeated, with postal online questionnaires there is no research present to influence answers. Questionnaires allowed a comparisons both overtime and between different societies as we can compare the results obtained.
  • Hypothesis testing- useful for testing hypothesis about causing effect relationships between different variables
• Advantages

  Detachment and objectivity- positive favour questionnaires as attached and objective as the sociologist personal involvement is kept a minimum e.g. postal questionnaires involve to contact with respondents

  • Representativeness- questionnaires collect information from a large amount of people so the results are more likely to be representative
• Advantages

  Ethical issues- questionnaires pose fewer ethical problems and most other research methods, although questionnaires often ask intrusive or sensitive questions, the respondents are under no obligation to answer them. However, research is should still gain Informed consent I’m make it clear that they have a right to not answer any of the questions if they don’t want to

  • This is attractive to positive as they take a scientific response and like cause an effect relationships that are detached and objective
• Disadvantages

  Practical problems- data tends to be limited and superficial, people can often not answer questions, people may not want to answer as there is no reward. With postal and online questions there is two additional problems. the researcher can’t be sure whether the potential respondent has actually received the questionnaire or whether a return questionnaire was actually completed by the person to whom it was addressed

  • low Response rate- can be a problem, people cba to answer eg in Hites study in America they sent out 100,000 questionnaires but only 4.5% of them were returned
• Disadvantages

  Low response rate- high response rate can be obtained if follow-up questionnaires are sent and if the questionnaires are collected by hand but this adds to the cost and time. Danger with low response rate is that those who return the questionnaire may be different to those who don’t e.g. busy people in full-time work may fail to respond where as unemployed people are more likely to fill it in

  • Inflexibility- very inflexible as the researcher is stuck with the questions they chose and cannot explore any more new areas compared to unstructured interviews where new Qs can be asked
• Disadvantages

  Questionnaires as snapshots- only one moment of time, the moment when the respondent answers the question so fail to produce a fully valid picture as they don’t capture the way people‘s attitude and behaviour changes
• Disadvantages

  Detachment- interpretivist such as Cicourel argue it lacks validity as it doesn’t give a true picture of what’s being studied, it’s argued you can only get this from contact and contact methods. Ideally methods should enable us to put ourselves in the subjects place which questionnaires can’t do as they’re the most dettached. Lack of contact means says no way to clarify what questions mean.

  • Lying, forgetting and ‘ right answerism’- people may lie, forget, not understand or lie to admit they don’t understand or try to give the ‘correct answer’
• disadvantages

  Imposing the researchers meaning- interpretivist argue that questionnaires are more likely to impose a researchers own meanings rather than reveal those of the respondent because:

  • they choose what questions to ask, researcher has already decided what is important not respondent
  • They use ended questions so respondents have to fit their views into the ones offered
  • If open questions are used, research comes to code the respondents answers into quantitive data