Advantages of questionnaires

Advantages of questionnaires

1. Practical advantages

   • Questionnaires offer several major practical advantages. They’re a quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numbers of people, who can be widely spread geographically. In addition, there’s no need to recruit and train interviewers or observers, because the respondents will complete and return the questionnaires themselves. Furthermore, the data is usually easily quantifiable, particularly where pre-coded, closed-ended questions are used, as these can be processed quickly by computer to reveal the relationships between different variables.

2. Reliability

   • Questionnaires are considered to be reliable; if repeated by another researcher, the questionnaire should give similar results as those gained the first time. There are two essential reasons for this: because the questionnaire will be identical to the original, meaning respondents will be asked the same questions, in the same order, with the same choice of answers, and because there is no interviewer present to influence answers. Essentially, questionnaires can be used by any researcher to obtain the same results, meaning one researcher’s study can be easily repeated and checked by another. The reliability of questionnaires means that any differences in answers can be assumed to be genuine differences between respondents, rather than simply being the result of different questions being asked. Furthermore, this allows comparisons, both over time and between societies. By asking the same questions, one can compare the the results obtained from different times and/or places.

3. Hypothesis testing

   • Questionnaires are very useful for testing hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between different variables. From this, statements can be made and possible causes can be identified, which is very attractive to positivist sociologists, who take a scientific approach and seek to discover laws of cause and effect.

4. Detachment and objectivity

   • Questionnaires are detached and objective; the sociologist’s personal involvement with their respondents is kept to a minimum. Postal questionnaires are completed at a distance and involve little or no personal contact with respondents, and for this reason, positivists see them as a good way of maintaining detachment and objectivity.

5. Ethical issues

   • Questionnaires pose fewer ethical problems than most other research methods. While they may ask intrusive questions, respondents are generally under no obligation to answer them. Nonetheless, researchers should gain respondents’ informed consent, guarantee their anonymity, and make it clear that they have a right to leave any question unanswered, should they so desire.

6. Representativeness

   • Questionnaires can collect information from a large number of people, meaning that the results are more likely to be truly representative of the wider population than with other methods, which can only study very small numbers of people. Furthermore, researchers using questionnaires tend to pay more attention to the need to obtain a representative sample. This representativeness allows one to make accurate generalisations about the wider population from which the sample was taken.