Intro to primary research and questionnaires Flashcards
What is primary data?
Info collected by the sociologists themselves for their own purpose
What are different primary methods?
- Social surveys
- Participant observations
- Experiment
What is an advantage of primary data?
Sociologists can collect the data they specifically need
What is the definition of a questionnaire?
Popular research method that consists of a list of questions
> can use closed or open/ both
> dependent on the sort of data desired, how the researcher intends to analyze it and sampling strategy
What is a verbal questionnaire?
Unstructured Interview
What are practical advantages to questionnaires?
- Quick to analyse once collected
- Quick and cheap to get large amounts of data from large numbers of people
- Self completion questionnaires: reduces cost - no interviews recruited or trained
Who used questionnaires as an example?
Connor and Dewson
What was Connor and Dewsons study?
Posted nearly 4000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions in their study of the factors which influenced working class decisions to attend uni
What’s a criticism of C&D’s study?
May not be representative as it doesn’t study what it was meant to
- Posted to HE Institutions which don’t consider the working class who didn’t go to uni
What are ethical advantages to questionnaires?
- Informed consent isn’t an issue as long as researchers are honest about the purpose
- Relatively unobtrusive method
- Detachment of the researcher
- Easy for respondents to ignore questionnaires if they don’t want to complete it
Why do positivists favour questionnaires?
Detached and objective (minimum sociologist personal involvement)
- Useful for testing hypotheses about causal relationships between variables
- Quantifiable = finding correlation
What do questionnaires allow researchers to do?
Collect info from a large number of people = more representative of the wider population
- all depends on appropriate sampling techniques used and knowledge of how it completed the questionnaire
How are questionnaires super reliable?
Can use the same exact questions and order, same choice of answers
- Self completion questionnaires (esp sent by post) no researcher present to influence the results
How is the imposition problem a disadvantage to questionnaires?
Influence of values on the questions written
- Based on the researchers biased views
- Researchers may choose questions that align with what they want to hear
- Decide what’s important instead of the respondent when choosing
Why do interpretivists dislike questionnaires?
Detached nature
- Lack of close contact between researcher and respondents
- No way to guarantee that the respondents are interpreting the questions in the same way as the researcher
Why is the detached nature of questionnaires a disadvantage?
May not be present to check whether respondents are giving socially desirable answers or lying
- can’t check who is completing the questions
What are closed questions?
Questions that structure the answer by only allowing responses which fit into pre decided categories
What are the 2 types of closed questions?
Nominal and Ordinal
What are nominal questions?
dichotomous - restricted category
- 2 options that oppose each other
What are ordinal questions?
Can be ranked
- Often involves using a continuous rating scale to measure the strength of attitudes or emotions
What do closed questions link to?
positivism
What are strengths of closed questions?
- Economical: large amounts of data for low costs
- Ability for large sample size (should be representative) = generalization
- Quantifiable info for statistical analysis
- Standardized questions: same questions, same order
- Can be replicated
- Can use questionnaires to check for consistent results
What is a limitation of closed questions?
Lack detail
> responses are fixed
> less scope for respondents to supply answers that reflect their true feelings on a topic
What do open questions do?
- Allow people to express what they think in their own words
- Enable the respondents to answer in as much detail and in their own words
- No present answer options and allow respondents to put down exactly what they want to say
What are open questions used for?
Complex questions that cannot be answered in a few simple categories but require more detail and discussion
Who used open questions?
Kohlberg
What was KohlBerg’s study?
Presented participants with moral dilemmas
- Concerned a character called Heinz whose faced with the choice to either watch his wife die of cancer or steal the only drug that could help her
- Participants asked which they would choose and their reasoning for upholding/breaking the law
What are the limitation of open questions?
- Time consuming to collect data
> long to complete open questions = may use a small sample size - Time consuming to analyse data
> have to read answers and put them into categories by coding (subjective and difficult) - Not suitable for less educated respondents as it require superior writing skills and a better ability to express ones feelings verbally
What are strengths of open questions?
- Rich qualitative data obtained as open questions allow the response to elaborate on their answer
- Means the research can find out why a person holds a certain attitude
What’s a practical disadvantage to questionnaires?
Low response rate
