Questionnaires - Advantages and Disadvantages Flashcards
Which sociologists mainly view questionnaires as having lots of advantages?
Positivist sociologists
Which sociologists mainly view questionnaires as having lots of disadvantages?
Interpretivists
Practical advantages (three)
Quick and cheap way of getting large quantities of data
No need to train or recruit interviewers
Data usually easy to quantify
Why are questionnaires reliable? (Three)
They can be repeated to give another researcher similar results
People’s answers are most likely their own ideas
Comparisons can be made another time
What are questionnaires a useful way of testing?
A hypothesis about cause-and-effect relationships
Detachment advantage of questionnaires
Researcher detached from research meaning their personal impact is at a minimum
Why do results of questionnaires have higher chances of being representative of the wider population?
Because they collect data from large amounts of people
What are questionnaires more likely to allow to be made?
Generalisations
What must be gained by conducted of questionnaire?
Informed consent
What must be kept anonymous by conductor of questionnaire?
Identity of participants
Practical disadvantages (three)
Data tends to be limited and superficial as they need to stay brief and not time consuming
Researcher cannot be sure potential respondents received questionnaire
Possibility that questionnaire wasn’t carried out by individual it was intended to
How can questionnaires be expensive (practical disadvantage)?
Is a prize is required to get people to take part
Response rates of questionnaires
Tend to be very low
What is there a risk of the data being if response rates are low?
Unrepresentative
What are questionnaires inflexible?
Because new interest of areas can’t be studied once questions have been finalised
Why do questionnaires fail to produce a cult valid picture of something?
Because they only give a picture of reality at the given time of the questionnaire being conducted
What may the degree of the researchers detachment result in? Why?
A lack of validity because Interpretivists argue that you can only get an accurate picture of something by being close to the participant
What do answers of a questionnaire depend on?
How willing the respondents are to provide full and accurate answers
What may respondents do when answering a questionnaire?
They may lie, forget, not know, not understand or not try
