What type of research uses questionnaires

In fact, the questionnaire involves a particular kind of interview—a formal contact, in which the conversation is governed by the wording and order of questions in the instrument. The questionnaire often is administered in a standardized fashion, that is, in the same way to all the respondents of the survey. The logic behind the standardization of questions and answers is that only if a stimulus is the same for all the respondents of a survey can it be, at Show page numbers Download PDF.

Search form icon-arrow-top icon-arrow-top. Page Site Advanced 7 of This is useful for large populations when interviews would be impractical. However, a problem with questionnaires is that respondents may lie due to social desirability. Most people want to present a positive image of themselves and so may lie or bend the truth to look good, e.

Questionnaires can be an effective means of measuring the behavior, attitudes, preferences, opinions and, intentions of relatively large numbers of subjects more cheaply and quickly than other methods.

Often a questionnaire uses both open and closed questions to collect data. This is beneficial as it means both quantitative and qualitative data can be obtained. Closed questions structure the answer by only allowing responses which fit into pre-decided categories. Data that can be placed into a category is called nominal data. The category can be restricted to as few as two options, i. Closed questions can also provide ordinal data which can be ranked.

This often involves using a continuous rating scale to measure the strength of attitudes or emotions. Closed questions have been used to research type A personality e. They can be economical. This means they can provide large amounts of research data for relatively low costs.

Therefore, a large sample size can be obtained which should be representative of the population, which a researcher can then generalize from. The questions are standardized. All respondents are asked exactly the same questions in the same order. This means a questionnaire can be replicated easily to check for reliability.

Therefore, a second researcher can use the questionnaire to check that the results are consistent. They lack detail. Because the responses are fixed, there is less scope for respondents to supply answers which reflect their true feelings on a topic. Open questions allow people to express what they think in their own words.

Open-ended questions enable the respondent to answer in as much detail as they like in their own words. If you want to gather more in-depth answers from your respondents, then open questions will work better.

These give no pre-set answer options and instead allow the respondents to put down exactly what they like in their own words. Open questions are often used for complex questions that cannot be answered in a few simple categories but require more detail and discussion. They can be conducted in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the Internet. They can be about voting intentions, consumer preferences, social attitudes, health, or anything else that it is possible to ask people about and receive meaningful answers.

Although survey data are often analyzed using statistics, there are many questions that lend themselves to more qualitative analysis. Most survey research is nonexperimental. It is used to describe single variables e. But surveys can also be experimental. The study by Lerner and her colleagues is a good example. Their use of self-report measures and a large national sample identifies their work as survey research. But their manipulation of an independent variable anger vs.

By the s, the US government was conducting surveys to document economic and social conditions in the country. The need to draw conclusions about the entire population helped spur advances in sampling procedures.

At about the same time, several researchers who had already made a name for themselves in market research, studying consumer preferences for American businesses, turned their attention to election polling. A watershed event was the presidential election of between Alf Landon and Franklin Roosevelt. A magazine called Literary Digest conducted a survey by sending ballots which were also subscription requests to millions of Americans.

At the same time, the new pollsters were using scientific methods with much smaller samples to predict just the opposite—that Roosevelt would win in a landslide. In fact, one of them, George Gallup, publicly criticized the methods of Literary Digest before the election and all but guaranteed that his prediction would be correct. And of course it was. We will consider the reasons that Gallup was right later in this chapter.