Questionnaires

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  • Created by: ash8642
  • Created on: 24-10-18 11:18

Questionnaires

Advantages

  • Easy to understand - Practicalities
  • Easy to compare - Reliability
  • Easy to send out - Practicalities
  • Cheap to create - Practicalities
  • Anonymous - Ethics
  • Concise questions - Reliability
  • Funding bodies likely to endorse - Practicalities
  • Represent wider world - Reliability/Representativeness

Disadvantages

  • Low response rate (below 50%) - Representativeness
  • Some questions are very personal - Ethics
  • Closed-questions - Lacks validity
  • Imposition problem - Reduces validity
  • Less detailed answers - Lacks validity
  • Researcher bias - Reduce validity
  • Not accessible to everyone - Representativeness

Evaluation

Questionnaires are largely advantageous due to their practicalities. They offer a cheap method of research, and are largely accessible when sent out via postal services. Due to being quantitative data, the answers obtained from a questionnaire are easy to analyse, and are, therefore, generalizable to the wider population. However, questionnaires lack validity as they mainly use closed-questions which means that answers collected do not offer a great deal of detail. Questionnaires, also, run the risk of the imposition problem as the researcher could write the questions in a way that imposes their own view on the participant. Consequently, the researcher is receiving answers that agree with their views, but not the views of the participant. 

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