Questionnaires and interviews

• Questionnaires

  A set of written questions designed to assess a person's thoughts and experience
• Open questionnaires

  • Does not have a fixed range of answers
  • Respondents are free to to answer in any way they wish
  • Tend to produce qualitative data
  • Wide range of opinions gathered
  • Might be difficult to analyse
• Closed questionnaires

  • Questionnaires which offers a fixed number of responses
  • They tend to produce quantitative data which is easy to analyse
  • May lack depth and detail
• Interview 


  A live encounter where one person (an interviewer) asks questions to a interviewee to assess their thoughts or experiences
• Structured interviews

  • Interviews made up of pre-determined set of questions
  • Which are asked in a fixed manner
• Unstructured interview

  • Interview which works like a conversation
  • No set questions
  • General aim that a certain topic will be discussed but the interview if free flowing
  • Interviewee encouraged to expand and elaborate on their answers
• Semi-structured interview

  • There is a list of questions worked out in advance
  • Interviewer is free to ask any flow up questions
• Questionnaire strengths

  1. Cost-effective - gather large amount of data quickly as they can be distributed to a large number of people
  2. Can be completed without the researcher present - reduces the effort involved
  3. Straightforward data - easy to analyse. Data allows for statistical analysis and comparison with other groups of people through graphs and charts
• Questionnaire limitation

  1. Responses may not always be truthful - may be keen to present themselves in a positive light - demand characteristics - social desirability bias
  2. Response bias - they may all tend to reply in a similar way or the same favoured end of the rating scale - because they respond too quickly or fail to fail to read question properly - acquiescence bias
• Structured interviews strengths

  • Straightforward to replicate - standardised format
• Structured interviews limitations

  • Interviewers are unable to deviate from the topic or explain their questions
  • This limits the richness of the data collected
• Unstructured interviews strengths

  • More flexibility - can follow up points and gain an insight into the world view of the interviewee
  • Increases risk of interviewee bias
  • Analysis of data is not straightforward - the researcher may have to look through a lot of irrelevant information - making drawing conclusions difficult
  • Interviewees may lie for no reason - social desirability bias