Questionnaires Flashcards
What is a closed ended question?
Respondents must choose from a limited range of possible answers that the researcher has decided in advance
What is an open ended question?
Respondents are free to give whatever answer they wish
Name 6 advantages of questionnaires
- ethical
- representativeness
- detachment & objectivity
- hypothesis testing
- reliability
- practical
How are questionnaires practical?
They are a quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large amounts of data from large amounts of people, widely spread geographically, especially if a postal or online questionnaire is used
Give an example of how questionnaires are practical
Helen Connor & Sara Dewson (2001)
Posted nearly 4,000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country in their study of the factors influencing the decisions of w/c students to go to university
Give 2 more practical advantages of questionnaires
- there is no need to recruit and train interviewers or observers to collect the data, because respondents complete and return the questionnaires themselves
- the data is usually easy to quantify, particularly where pre-coded closed ended questions are used, and can be processed quickly by computer to reveal the relationships between different variables