Flashcards
Questionnaries
Cards in this deck (9)
- 1What are Questionnaires?-quick comparatively cheap way of conducting research
-two types: open-ended and close-ended - 2Advantages of Questionnaires (Part 1)-Practical advantages:
>quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numberes of people
>no need to reccruit and train interviewers or observers
>data is easy to quantify - 3Advantages of Questionnaires (Part 2)-reliability: questionnaires can easily be repeated, and for online or postal questionnaires there's no researcher present to infuence the respondants answers
-useful for testing hypotheses about cause and effect relationships between different variables - 4Advantages of Questionnaires (Part 3)- detatched and objective method; sociologist personal involvement is kept to a minimum
- representative as it can collect information from a large number of people, meaning the results stand a better chance of being truely representative of the wider population - 5Advantages of Questionnaires (Part 4)-questionnaires pose few ethical problems, however researchers should gain respondants' informed concent and guarantee anonymity and that they have the freedom to not answer
- 6Disadvantages of Questionnaires (Part 1)-Practical problems:
>data tends to be limited and superficial
>may be necessary to offer incentives to persuade respondants to complete the forms, adding to the cost
>with postal and online questionnaires we dont know whether the potential respondant recieved the questionnaire of whether the returned questionnaire was completed by who it was adressed to. - 7Disadvantages of Questionnaires (Part 2)-low response rate (e.g. Shere Hite's (1991) love passion and violence in America study : sent out 10,000 questionnaires but only 4.5% returned)
-inflexibility
-Questionnaires are snapshots, they give a picture of social reality at one moment in time/invalid. - 8Disadvantages of Questionnaires (Part 3)-detachment: lack of contact means there's no way to clarify misunderstandings
-method depends on the respondants' willingness and ability to provide accurate answers: They may lie, forget, not know, not understand, or try to please or second-guess the researcher. - 9Disadvantages of Questionnaires (Part 4)-imposing the researcher's meanings:
>by chosing the questions the researcher has decided what is important
>close-ended questions limits the respondants' views to what the researcher would want
> if open-ended the answers may get lumped together into the same category.
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- A level Sociology (research methods) Flashcards on Questionnaries, created by Dinah Bennett on 28/10/2017.
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- Dinah Bennett
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