Title: Questionnaires
Course: EDPS0009: Researching Education and Society: Qualitative Methods 2020/2021 > Section: 5. Questionnaires

Benefits and drawbacks of questionnaires

As all research methods, questionnaires do have a place and purpose within research. However, it is important to be fully aware of the benefits and drawbacks of questionnaires, in order to be able to mitigate some of the weaknesses.

Advantages:

- The data gathered is standardised and therefore, easy to analyse.
- Data can be gathered quickly from a large number of respondents.
- It is possible to compare your results with similar surveys used in other institutions.
- Respondents can answer anonymously which may produce more honest answers.
- Online surveys are relatively inexpensive.

Drawbacks:

- Responses may be inaccurate, especially through mis-interpretation of questions in self-completing questionnaires.
- A reasonable sample size is needed before the responses can be used to represent the population as a whole.
- Response rates can be poor, people may lack the motivation to complete or return the questionnaire. Consequently, some sort of incentive may have to be included, for example, a prize draw.
- The complexity of designing, producing, distributing, and analysing the questionnaires may make them expensive and time consuming.
- The data gathered with the questionnaires may not be enough to answer the questions you are seeking to answer in your research. More in-depth interviews or focus groups may be needed.

Designing a questionnaire

In this video, you will be introduced to 5 steps of designing a questionnaire.

Writing good survey questions

Here are two videos relating to writing good survey questions.

Watch the videos and make a note of the principles for good survey questions as mentioned in the videos.

Now that you have watched the videos and made a note on what makes "good survey questions", reflect on the similarities and differences between questionnaire questions and interview questions.
Could you do interviews as questionnaires? What is the relationship between interviews and questionnaires?

Fallacies in research

Within the context of research methods, we often fall prey to fallacies.

One such fallacy is that there is THE perfect method out there for the research question we would like to answer. This is not true. We can only choose the method(s) that is/are best suited, but all methods have their limitations. One way to mitigate the limitations could be to combine methods with one another, but even that is not perfect!

Another fallacy specifically relates to questionnaires: objectivity! Many researchers think that questionnaires are an objective way to gather data, and therefore use questionnaires in qualitative research to increase validity, reliability and generalisability. Unfortunately, that is not entirely true. The questionnaire may well take the researcher out of the immediate interaction with the participant (remember the data traveller in interviews or the participant in ethnographies). However, the researcher is still the one who has created the questionnaire and written the questions!

Check out the EPQ project questionnaire below and critique it:
What are its strengths?
Where are its weaknesses?
Can you spot some researcher bias?

From the project description:

With this project I would like to learn how music and politics are connected. The research question is: "To what extent is Slowthai more or less influential as a political artist in the 21^st century than Stormzy?"

Researcher's role

As we have seen the researcher has a very important role to play within the entire research process.

This is therefore the time to consider a key term in research: reflexivity.

What is your position? What are your thoughts? How could your personal experiences potentially impact and/or shape your research?