Questionnaires

What are questionnaires?

Questionnaires ask respondents to provide answers to pre-set questions

What are the two types of questionnaires?

Closed- ended questionnaire

Open-ended questionnaire

What is a closed-ened questionnaire?

Respondents must choose from a limited range of possible answers like ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ‘maybe’

What are open-ended questionnaires?

Respondents are free to give whichever answers

What are the advantages of questionnaires?

D- detachment and objectivity

E- ethical issues

R-reliability

R-representative

P-practical advantages

H-hypothesis testing

What are the practical advantages of questionnaires?

-Quick and cheap when gathering large amounts of data from a large set of people

-No need to recruit interviewers

-Easy to quantify if closed ended, pre-coded questions

What is an example of the practical advanatage of questionnaires being quick and cheap?

Connor and Dewson - posted nearly 4000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions, study factors that influence wc students to go to university

What is the first reason questionnaires are reliable?

When the research is repeated, a questionnaire identical to the one used before with the same qs and order and same choice of answers as original respondents

What is the second reason for questionnaires being reliable?

With postal/online questionnaires, no interviewer present to influence respondents answers

Why is the reliability of questionnaires really useful?

If we get different responses on the second questionnaire compares to the first, we can assume it is from genuine differences instead of other variables

It allows comparisons, both overtime and between different societies

How is hypothesis testing an advantage of questionnaires?

Questionnaires can be used to test hypotheses about different cause and effect relationships between different variables

How is detachment and objectivity an advantage for questionnaires?

Sociologists personal involvement with respondents is kept to a minimum-

How is representativeness an advantage of questionnaires?

Questionnaires can collect information from a large number of people so the results have a higher chance of being representative of the wider population than only studying small numbers of people

How is a lack of ethical issues an advantage for questionnaires?

Although questionnaires may ask intrusive qs, respondents are under no obligation to answer, still need consent for questionnaires. they pose fewer ethical problems compared to other methods.

What are the disadvantages of questionnaires?

P-practical problems

L-low response rate

I-inflexibility

R- ‘right answerism’

S-snapshots

I-imposing researcher’s meanings

D-detatchment

What are the practical issues of questionnaires?

• Although questionnaires can be cheap, people need incentives to complete them, increasing costs

• researcher is not sure if the respondent has received questionnaire/ if it was actually completed for the respondent it was meant for

How is a low response rate a disadvantage of questionnaires?

• Reason of low response rate is because people do not understand the language used in questionnaire, only completed by well educated

• If respondents are different from non-respondents, produce distorted and unrepresentative results

What are the statistics for a low response rate for questionnaires?

Cleave- only 1/3 of questionnaires are returned after completion

Hite’s study 100,000 questionnaires only 4.5% were returned

How is inflexibility a disadvantage of questionnaires?

Questionnaires are very inflexible, they cannot change or add more questions once they have been finalised, can’t explore new interests like in an unstructured interview

How is snapshots a disadvantage of questionnaires?

Questionnaires fail to produce a valid picture because they do not capture people’s attitudes and behaviour change, participant observation can show this

How is detachment also a disadvantage of questionnaires?

Questionnaires fail to put ourselves in the subject’s place and see the world through their eyes, lack of contact = misunderstandings

What does Cicourel argue?

Data from questionnaires lack validity, only valid method is to get close to subject to understand meaning

How is ‘right answerism’ a disadvantage of questionnaires?

Some participants may give ‘right;’ answers regarding what is socially desirable rather than tell the truth.

How is imposing the researcher’s meanings a disadvantage of questionnaires?

By choosing the questions to ask, researcher has decided what is important

If we use closed- ended questions, respondents have to fit their views into constraining questions

If we use qualitative, researcher may slump non-identical answers into the same category

What does Shipman argue?

'When the researchers categories are not the respondents , ‘pruning and bending’ the data is inevitable

Operationalisation of concepts- Methods in context

Advantage or disadvantage?

OC involved turning abstract ideas into measurable form. Difficult when creating a questionnaire for pupils as they may not understand complex ideas like ‘cultural capital’, simplifying it will lose its meaning/ cause misunderstandings, hindering the validity of the data