Methods - Questionnaires

Question 1

What are the kinds of questionnaires?

Answer 1

• Open Vs. Closed Vs. Mixed
• Self-completion Vs. Assisted

Question 2

What are the practical advantages and problems of self-completion questionnaires?

Answer 2

+ Incredibly quick and cheap, especially if postal or online and if questions are closed
+ No need to hire or train interviewers

Question 3

What are the practical disadvantages of self-completion questionnaires

Answer 3

• Limited information can be gathered as questions are often brief
• Incentives are often required to get participants, otherwise you have a low response rate
• Participant has no way of clarifying anything, affecting both response rate

Question 4

What are the ethical advantages and disadvantages of self-completion questionnaires?

Answer 4

+ Respondents are under no obligation to answering if uncomfortable
- May cause harm due to lack of comforting presence

Question 5

What are the theoretical advantages of self-completion questionnaires?

Answer 5

+ Positivists: large-scale creates representativeness and allows us to find regional trends
+ Easy repeatability creates reliability and allows us to find temporal trends
+ Minimal personal involvement allows researcher to be as objective as possible

Question 6

What are the theoretical disadvantages advantages of self-completion questionnaires?

Answer 6

• Interpretivists: Shipman (1997): if participant’s meaning is different to researcher ‘pruning and bending’ are inevitable, distorting data
• Validity is affected by lying and ‘right answerism’
• Participant has no way of clarifying anything, affecting validity

Question 7

What is the difference between open and closed questionnaires?

Answer 7

Open questionnaires ask questions that don’t have set answers like ‘yes’ or ‘no’, this makes them more valid and allows the researcher to gain a more in depth understanding of participant but takes much longer and often has to be smaller-scale, affecting reliability.

Question 8

What is the difference between self-completion and assisted questionnaires?

Answer 8

Assisted questionnaires are completed with an experimentor in attendance to clarify anything: although this mitigates misunderstandings and increases response rate, it takes much longer and allows you to send out less surveys - basically being a glorified structured interview.