Questionnaires

Question 1

Strengths of open questions

Answer 1

-Allow participants to state their attitudes and opinions
-Recall their experiences in their own words
-Useful to capture new ideas from your participants
-Enables you to collect qualitative data

Question 2

Weaknesses of open questions

Answer 2

-more difficult to draw conclusions because there’s more likely to be a wider range of answers/ responses
-interpreting what people mean is likely to be subjective

Question 3

Factors that affect the validity

Answer 3

-Length of the questionnaire (lose interest if too long)
- Promise of confidentiality
-social desirability (not truthful)
-Researcher watching participant
-Poorly designed questions
E.g ambiguous/ unclear / vague
Leading ( race,gender )
Participants answers vary from the options available

Question 4

How to have strong reliability

Answer 4

• standardised questions so questions can be replicated and thus reliability can be checked
  -standardised procedures (e.g participants answer the questionnaire in a similar environment, same researcher, same time)
  -standard instructions help improve ease of replication and ensure results are reliable

Question 5

Strengths of closed questions

Answer 5

• Easy to analyse because data is in quantitative (numbers) which can be summarised using averages and simple graphs
  -this makes it easier to draw conclusions (e.g because u can make conclusions)
  -Answers are more objective because they are more likely to be interpreted in the same way by different researchers.

Question 6

Weaknesses of closed questions

Answer 6

• May not permit people to express their precise feelings because the researcher determines the choice of answers. So data might lack validity
  -They tend not to uncover new insights
  -oversimplifies reality and human experiences as it suggests that there are simple answers whereas people are likely to think of
  Several answers that reflect their views

Question 7

Strengths of questionnaires

Answer 7

Respondents record their own answers. The questions are pre-determined (structured) and they are provide in written form so no face to face contact with another person

Self report methods are a means of finding out what people think and feel - not the same for other methods
Can easily be repeated so that data can be collected from large samples