Questionnaires

Question 1

Practical Advantages of Questionnaires

Answer 1

quick & cheap, easy to quantify, no need to train interviewers, reliable.

Question 2

Advantages of Questionnaires

Answer 2

Hypothesis testing, Detachment & Objectivity, Representativeness, Ethical Issues.

Question 3

Positivists & Questionnaires

Answer 3

Positivists favour questionnaires because they are detached and objective, where the sociologists personal involvement is kept to a minimum. For example postal questionnaires are completed at distance and involve little to no personal contact.

Question 4

Disadvantages of questionnaires

Answer 4

Low response rate, Detachment, Inflexibility, Lying forgetting, Imposing the researcher’s meanings, questionnaires as snapshots

Question 5

Practical Disadvantages of questionnaires

Answer 5

limited and superficial, cheap however may need to offer incentives which may add to the cost.

Question 6

Low response Rate as a disadvantage of questionnaires

Answer 6

Hite’s (1991) study of ‘love’ passion and emotional violence’ in Amercia sent out 100,000 questionnaires, but only 4.5% of them were returned.

Question 7

Detachment as a disadvantage of questionnaires

Answer 7

(Interpretivists) Cicourel (1968) argues that data from questionnaires lacks validity and doesn’t give a true picture of what has been studied, they argue that we should be able to see the world through their eyes.

Question 8

Imposing the researcher’s meanings

Answer 8

Shipman (1997) argues that when the researcher’s catergories are not the respondent’s catergories, ‘pruning and bending’ of the data is inevitable which can distorts the respondents’ meanings and undermines the validity of the data.