Questionnaires and Research Methods

Questionnaire is set of questions which could be written or multiple choice question given to the individuals or groups to find the factual information.

Questionnaires are “a series of questions asked to individuals to obtain statistically useful information about a given topic” (Bryant, L, 2014). There are different types of questionnaires that include face to face, phone, post and online.

4. What are the limitations of the survey method, and how would you overcome the limitations of this research method, or any research approach?

A questionnaire is a list of a research or survey questions asked to respondents, and designed to extract quantitative date. Questionnaires are easily distributed to the community and can be completed and collected on the spot or be emailed or posted back to the researcher. Self completed questionnaires are the most common survey as they are cheap and can be passed to a lot of people. Some sociologists tend not to use questionnaires because of their low response rate and lack of validity. Also, some people may give false information so some researchers like to stick to interviews and experiments for increased accuracy. I will explore why sociologists shy away from using questionnaires.

A questionnaire is research which involves a number of different questions to gather information from the people who are filling it in. Questionnaires are designed as a way to find out what people are thinking. An advantage of questionnaires is that it is very practical because it is quick to collect information from the people filling out the questionnaire. Another advantage of questionnaires is that the same questions is asked to everyone filling the questionnaire out so easy to sum up. The final advantage to questionnaires is that large information can be collected. There are also some disadvantages to questionnaires which is that there is no way of telling how much though someone who is filling the questionnaire out has put it. Another disadvantage is that the person filling it out may forget what has happened to fill it out so it won’t be reliable. The final disadvantage to questionnaires is that there is no way to tell how truthful a respondent is being.

“Research in health and social care usually relies on obtaining information from individuals using social research methodologies”. (Whitehouse, M, 2010:428). Questionnaires are suitable for obtaining important information from many individuals in a survey who are answering the questions this is known as ‘respondents’. Questionnaires gives us the opportunity to ask questions of participants but also allows answers to be given according to the options constructed by the researcher using a response frame. A response frame allows a limited choice of different responses. Also there are self-completion questions this allows respondents to fill in the answers themselves. The questionnaire may be delivered to individuals directly by hand or by post or even online the researcher may contact through an email address. They may be asked to complete a customer satisfaction questionnaire. For example at college we are sent online questionnaires through are student email, questionnaires

Surveys can be used to collect information on a wide range of things, including personal facts, attitudes, past behaviors, and opinions. Survey research can be specific and limited, or it can have more global, widespread

The participants may not have been willing to answer the questions. They might not wish to reveal the information or they might think that they will not benefit from responding perhaps even be penalised by giving their real opinion. Students should be told why the information is being collected and how the results will be beneficial. Some advantages of the methods would be that information can be collected from a large portion of a group.

1) If you answer yes to the above question regarding health insurance, can you tell me if using health insurance removes communication barriers when visiting a doctor?

172). The relationship between the research design and data collection is dynamic, and the surveys purpose could have some influence on the type of survey model used. If there are problems in the collection of information the design can be changed. That is when the type of survey can be considered to decide if they should use face-to-face, telephone, or mailed surveys. According to O’Sullivan, Rassel, and Berner (2008), “respondents may ignore questionnaires that seem biased,” and “respondents’ perception of a built-in bias may largely center on the appropriateness of the response categories” (p. 179).

questioning a large sample of people. Surveys usually consist of a set of questions, presented either

It is used to find out people’s views and opinions on matters, instead of holding experiments or using comparisons. It is a way of “collecting data and analysing it to draw a conclusion.” Source: (Research Methods in Psychology – www.study.com) There are a few different types of survey methods, one of them being questionnaires.

generalizable results because of large sample sizes, results can be threatened by many factors including: faulty questionnaire design; sampling and non – responses errors; biased, questionnaire design & wording; respondent unreliability; ignorance, misunderstanding, or bias, errors in coding, processing & statistical analysis; and faulty interpretation of results. Questionnaire research can be seen as over-reliant on instruments & thus, disconnected from everyday life, with measurement processes creating a

The strength of questionnaires is it can give an insight into respondent’s thoughts and opinions and also cost efficient as it is inexpensive.

In survey method research, participants answer questions administered through interviews or questionnaires. After participants answer the questions, researchers describe the responses given. In order for the survey to be both reliable and valid it is important that the questions are constructed properly. Questions should be written so they are clear and easy to comprehend.