Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

The term “survey” covers both questionnaires and interviews – basically surveys gather information from a number of people.

Questionnaires

Types of questionnaires

• Self-completion questionnaires
  
• Postal
  
• e-mail
  
• College surveys
  
• Census
  

Question types

• open-ended
  
• closed
  

To gather quantitative data closed questions are usually used. Closed questions are often “pre-coded”

Advantages of questionnaires

• gather lots of data
  
• can be cheap to administer, especially self-completion ones
  
• quantitative data is easy to analyse
  

Disadvantages of questionnaires

• people may not always be honest
  
• with self-completion questionnaires don’t always know who has answered them & may not get a good “response rate” – sample may not be representative
  

• e.g. mothers with many children v. mothers with only one or two
  

• pre-coded questionnaires may limit people’s responses – may not get the full picture
  

Considerations when designing a questionnaire

When designing a questionnaire you need to think about the following things:

Information

• What data am I trying to gather?
  
• What things do I need to ask questions about?
  

• considering what you are trying to find out about
  

• What choices of answer am I going to give my respondents?
  

• pre-coded questionnaire,
  
• have you given them enough choices?� Too many?
  

• Have I included any unnecessary questions?
  
• Do my questions give me ALL of the data I need?
  

• too many questions give you too much data
  
• people resent answering lots and lots of questions
  
• too few questions and you don’t get the data you wanted
  

Respondents

• Who do I want to answer this questionnaire?
  

• who is your questionnaire aimed at
  

• Could any of my questions or answer choices be offensive to some people?
  

• language, age, assumptions, topics of questions
  

• Will people be able to understand my questions?

• language used, answer options
  

• Are any of my questions “leading”?
  
• Are respondents likely to ask these questions honestly?
  

• be careful of bias
  
• are questions embarrassing?
  

If the questionnaire is a self-completion one:
Is my questionnaire easy to read and well laid out? – can people tell which answers belong to which question and which question they need to answer next?
Questionnaire Design Try out your skills on a sample!

Interviews

The key thing to remember about interviews is that they involve interaction between the researcher and the respondent(s) – this is the thing that produces most of the advantages and problems of interviews.

To see a PowerPoint on interviews, click here

Apply your knowledge!:
Interviews review
Interviewer bias
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