AQA A Level Sociology Questionnaires T+M

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  • Questionnaires
    • Types of questions
      • Closed-ended
      • Open-ended
    • Practical Issues
      • Quick and cheap
      • No need to recruit people
      • Easily quantifiable data
      • Data is often limited and superficial
        • Due to questionnaires needing to be brief
      • May need to offer incentives which adds to the cost
      • Can't be sure the intended recipient completed it
      • Low response rates are a major problem
        • Faulty design such as too-complex language
      • They are inflexible: can't be used to explore any new lines of enquiry
      • Must be familiar with the topic to come up w/ questions
    • Theoretical Issues
      • Positivism
        • Produce representative findings that are generalisable to the rest of the population
        • Hypothesis testing
          • Questionnaires test hypotheses and identify relationships
          • Due to using quantitative data
        • Reliability
          • Easily repeatable
          • Findings can be checked/ falsified
          • The questionnaire is a standardised measuring instrument
        • Representativeness
          • Due to being large-scale
          • They use representative samples with sophisticated sampling techniques
        • Detachment and objective
          • No opinions present
      • Interpretivism
        • The detachment fails to produce a valid picture of actors' meanings, lack of contact, may lead to language barriers... results in invalid data
        • Lying, forgetting and trying to impress
          • Schofield (1965): misunderstanding of the question 'Are you a virgin?' caused invalid data
          • Right answerism
        • Imposing the researcher's meanings
          • Choosing questions in advance causes bias: the researcher chooses what's important
          • Risk a distorted reality and undermining validity regardless of question type
            • Closed-ended: they are a kind of straitjacket where respondents have to try and fit their views into the answers on offer
            • Open-ended: in order to quantify answers, non-identical answers may get lumped together (Shipman, 1997)

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