Questionnaires

• Questionnaires

  • List of questions designed to collect information from large groups of people in standardised form to measure opinions, attitudes and tastes
  • Distributed by mail, face to face or handed out to be returned
• Closed questions

  • Fixed number of responses = yes/no
  • Pre-coded to provide quantitative data
  • Measure attitudes and intensions
• Open questions, positivist

  • Allows respondent to provide unique responses, providing qualitative data
  • Measure meanings and motives
• Rutter

  Used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner-London secondary schools

  • wanted to look at how well students did in relation to class size, number of staff and school size
  • found correlations between the various factors
• Advantages of closed questionnaires

  • Practical = quick and easy to distribute > broad range of respondents > increase representativeness
  • Ethical = respondents can choose to not answer distressing questions
• Disadvantages of closed questionnaires

  • Practical = people may provide socially desirable answers, Hawthorne effect > lack representativeness as responses aren't always true
  • Ethical = may only give information if anonymity is remained
  • Theoretical = fixed responses > lack validity > doesn't contain meanings and motives
• Disadvantages of open questionnaires

  • Practical = time consuming to analyse
  • Ethical = may only give information if anonymity is remained
  • Theoretical = responses less likely to be repeated > lack reliability