Questionnaires

Practical advantages of questionnaires

• Quick and cheap

• Don’t need to recruit or train interviewers

• The data is easy to quantify

Positivists on questionnaires

They favour questionnaires because of their main goal of reliability, generalisability and representativeness:

• Standardized questions and answers which can be repeatable

• Pre-coded responses that help with quantity data

• Often large scale and thus representativeness

• Unbias

Interpretivists on questionnaires

They reject the use of questionnaires because they are close ended questions. They fail to achieve their main goal of validitiy

3 reasons why questionnaires may be high in reliability

1. Easily compare answers between both over time and different societies

2. Different answers is a real difference rather than due to different questions

3. Any researcher can use the results and reuse the questions

4. Very little ethical concern as individuals can simply choose not to complete it

Limitations of questionnaires

Practical problem - Limits on the amount of information that can be gathered due to limited and superficial questions

Response rate - low

Inflexibility - Stuck with the same question

Snapshots - only captures the participants attitude during that specific moment in time

Lying - people may lie to fit what they think the interviewer would want

Cannot expand on a point