Questionnaires

Question 1

What are the advantages of questionnaires?

Answer 1

• Used for reaching larger more representative samples
• Postal questionnaires allow the research to be geographically diverse
• Less time consuming
• Cheap to carry out
• useful for research into sensitive subjects
• positivists argue that they are scientific so have a high reliability and it produces lots of statistical data

Question 2

What are the disadvantages of questionnaires?

Answer 2

• people can’t be bothered to reply so suffer from low response rates and therefor may not be representative
• difficult to go into depth as the question needs to be as clear as possible
• people may interpret the question differently
• can only be used by literate people
• artificial devices so people may respond with suspicion
• closed questions suffer from the ‘imposition problem’