Questionnaires complete

• Questionnaires


  Lists of written questions, usually closed-ended and often posted, that can gather data on large numbers cheaply and quickly
• Types of questions in questionnaires

  • Closed-ended (respondents must choose from a limited range of possible answers)
  • Open-ended (respondents are free to give whatever answer they wish, in their own words)
• Positivists favour questionnaires because they achieve the main positivist goals of reliability, generality and representativeness
• Interpretivists reject the use of questionnaires because they impose the researcher's framework of ideas on respondents and fail to capture the meanings held by social actors
• Practical advantages 


  Quick and cheap way of gathering large amounts of data widely spread geographically especially if posted or online

  example Helen Conner and Dewson 2001 posted 4000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country to research factors effecting decision of working class students to go to university
• Advantage practical

  No need to recruit and train interviewers or observe to collect the data

  data is usually easy to quantify particularly when pre coded closed ended questions
• Reliability 


  Can be repeated and replicated

  no researcher present to influence the respondents answer

  allows comparison to be made overtime and between different societies
• Hypothesis testing 


  Can test the cause and effect relationship between different variables
• Detachment and objectivity

  Personal involvement with the respondent is kept to a minimum
• Representativeness 


  As can collect data from a large number they stand a better chance of being truly representative of a wider population they can also be generalised
• Ethical issues 


  May ask sensitive questions but respondents are not obligated to answer consent is gained

  consent is gained
• Practical problems

  Data tends to be limited and superficial as they are fairly brief

  necessary to offer an incentive to persuade respondents to complete the form

  with postal and internal has the respondent received the questionnaire and if it was completed by the respondent it was addressed to
• Low response rate

  Mainly postal questionnaires

  hites 1991 study of love passion and emotional violence in American sent 100000 questionnaires only 4.5 percentage of them were returned

  non response is sometimes caused by faulty questionnaire design that uses complex language may only be com by the well educated

  those who return the questionnaires my have different responses for those who didn’t
• Inflexibility

  Once they have been finalised the researcher is stuck with the questions and cannot explore a new area of interest should they come up during research
• Questionnaires as snapshots

  Give a picture of social reality at one moment in time when the respondent answers the questions so fail to produce a fully valid picture as attitude and behaviour changes
• Detachment 


  Lack of contact means there is no way to clarify what the question means to the respondent or to deal with misunderstanding
• Lying forgetting and right answerism 


  Problems of validity are created when respondents give answers that are not full or frank for example respondents may lie forget not know or try to please the researcher some may give respectable answers that they feel they ought to give rather then tel the truth
• A valid method is one that gives a truthful picture of people's meanings and experiences
• Interpretivists


  Argue that questionnaires are more likely to impose the researcher's own meanings than to reveal those of the respondent
• By choosing which questions to ask, the researcher has already decided what is important
• Closed-ended questions force respondents to fit their views into the options provided
• Respondents may feel other answers are important but have no opportunity to provide them in closed-ended questions
• Open-ended questions allow respondents to answer freely
• When coding open-ended responses to produce quantitative data, similar but non-identical answers may be lumped together
• Marten Shipman: ''When the researcher's categories are not the respondent's categories, pruning and bending of the data is inevitable''
• The questionnaire imposes a straitjacket that distorts the respondents' meanings and undermines the validity of the data
• The response in Schofield's research suggests problems with questionnaire research