Questionnaires

• Questionnaires


  A versatile research method often used by sociologists to assess people's attitudes, behaviors and motivations
• Questionnaire distribution


  1. Mailed out to respondents

  2. Researcher completes with respondent

  3. Self-completion by respondents
• Types of questions in questionnaires


  • Closed questions (fixed number of responses)
  • Open questions (allow respondent's own unique answer)
• Closed questions


  • Pre-coded to turn into quantitative data
  • Useful for finding out attitudes and intended behaviors
• Open questions


  • Produce more contextual qualitative data
  • Explain meanings and motivations behind responses
• Trend for combining closed and open questions to gather quantitative data on opinions and understand motivations behind responses
• In exams, students are often asked about written questionnaires or self-completion questionnaires
• Advantages of questionnaires


  • Relatively cheap and quick to produce
  • Less intrusive than interviews and observations
  • Potential for large-scale distribution to increase representativeness
  • Respondents familiar with the method
• Disadvantages of questionnaires


  • Low response rate
  • Need to carefully design questions to avoid leading or ambiguous questions
  • Closed questions limit respondent's voice
  • Open questions time-consuming to analyze
• Ethical issues with questionnaires


  • Potential to cause distress to respondents
  • Need to protect respondent's personal data
  • Sensitive content may be disclosed
  • May reveal immoral or illegal activities
• Theoretical issues with questionnaires


  • Closed questions lower in validity
  • Open questions may lack reliability
  • Uncertainty over whether respondents give true opinions
• Positivists prefer quantitative data from closed questions, while interpretivists favor qualitative data from open questions
• Examples of questionnaires


  • Census
  • Levels of cultural capital study
  • Crime Survey of England and Wales