Questionnaires

• Issues affecting representativeness

  • Self completion suffer from problem of self-selecting sample > certain people more likely to complete > unrepresentative
  • Postal questions suffer from low response rate
• 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

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

  • Cheap and quick to distribute
  • Less intrusive than methods like observations
  • Broad range of respondents = increased representativeness
  • Respondents familiar with layout
• Practical issues

  • Likely to be low response rate = too low to give representative sample
  • Closed = imposition of obligation
  • Open = time consuming to analyse
• Ethical issues

  • Sensitive topics could cause distress
  • May only give information in anonymity is maintained
  • May disclose immoral responses
• Theoretical issues

  • Closed = lack validity = fixed responses
  • Open = lack reliability, responses less likely to be repreated
  • Measuring true opinions or behaviours?
• 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