Questionnaires

Practical problems

The data from questionnaires tend to be limited and superficial. This is because they tend to be fairly brief, since most respondents are unlikely to compare and return a long, time-consuming questionnaire.

Low response rate

Very low response rates can be a major problem, especially with postal questionnaires.

If the respondents are different from the non-respondents, this will provide distorted and unrepresentative results, from which no accurate generalisations can be made.

Inflexibility

Questionnaires are a very inflexible method. Once the questionnaire has been finalised, the researcher is stuck with the questions they have decided to ask and cannot explore any areas of interest should they come up during the research.

Questionnaires are just snapshots in time

They give a picture of social reality only in a moment of time- the moment when the respondent answers the questions.

Detachment

Lack of contact means that there is now way to clarify what the questions mean to the respondent or to deal with misunderstandings. Questionnaires fail to do this because they are the most detached of all primary methods.

Lying, forgetting and ‘Right answer-ism’

Problems of validity are created when respondents give answers that are not full or frank. For example, respondents may forget, not know, not understand, or try to please, or second-guess the researcher. Some may give ‘respectable’ answers they feel they ought to give, rather than tell the truth.

The ‘Imposition Problem’ (imposing researcher’s meanings)

By choosing which questions to ask, the researcher, not the respondent, has already decided what is important. If we use close-ended questions, respondents then try to fit their own views into the ones on offer.

What does the acronym P.E.T mean?

Practical issues: time and money- the researcher’s access to resources can be a major part in determining which methods they employ.

Ethical issues: covert research- when the researcher’s identity and research purpose are hidden from the people being studied.

Theoretical issues: validity- produces a genuine picture of what something is really like.

Practical advantages

Questionnaires offer several major practical advantages:

• They are quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numbers of people, widely spread geographically, especially if a postal or online questionnaire is used.

• There is no need to recruit and train interviewers or observers to collect data, because respondents complete and return the questionnaire themselves.

Reliability

When the research is repeated the questionnaire is identical to the original one, so new respondents are asked the exactly the same questions, in the same order, with the same choice of answers, as the original respondents.

Hypothesis testing (show how they help discover cause and effect relationships)

Questionnaires are particularly useful for testing hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between different variables.

Why do positivists like this cause and effect advantage?

Because questionnaires enable us to identify possible causes, they are very attractive to positivist sociologists, who take a scientific approach and seek to discover laws of cause and effect in social behaviour and attitudes, allowing for objective analysis of relationships between variables.

Detached and objective

Positivists also favour questionnaires because they are a detached and objective (unbiased) method, where the sociologists personal involvement with their respondents is kept to a minimum.

Representativeness

Researchers who use questionnaires tend to pay more attention to the need to obtain a representative sample. For these reasons, the findings of questionnaires are more likely to allow us to make accurate generalisations about the wider population from which the sample was drawn.

Ethical issues

Questionnaires pose fewer ethical issues than other research methods. They make ask sensitive questions but respondents are under no obligation to answer them.