Social Surveys - Questionnaires and Interviews (Part 2) - Advantages

Closed Ended Questionnaires: Are more likely to be used by positivists, be reliable, representative, objective, be generalised from and produce social facts. Positivists like them as the data can be represented numerically, be used to establish cause and effect and ultimately make sociology more scientific. Data can be collected quickly and cheaply and from a large geographical area.

Structured Questions do not allow subjects to express their opinions and they may feel constrained by yes/no answers. This leads to a lack of validity.


General Advantages of Questionnaires:
Practical Advantages include the fact that they are a quick and cheap method of gathering large quantities of data from large number of people. There is no need to recruit and train interviewers to collect the data. The data is usually quantifiable especially where closed questions are used. Computers can quickly reveal the relationship between different variables.
The questionnaires are also reliable because if they are repeated by a researcher then a questionnaire should give similar results to those gained by the first researchers. The reliability of questionnaires also means that if we do find differences then we can assume that they are real differences.
A related advantage of questionnaires is that they allow comparisons to be made both over time and between different societies.
Hypothesis testing is where questionnaires allow us to establish a cause and effect relationship between different variables, for example, between poverty and educational achievement. From this we can make statements about the possible causes of low achievement. Positivists like this as it is a scientific approach which seeks to discover laws of cause and effect.
Detachment and objectivity. Positivists also favour questionnaires as they are unbiased form of research, where the sociologist's personal involvement is kept to a minimum.
Representativeness is another advantage because questionnaires collect information from a large number of people then they stand a better chance of being truly representative. For these reasons the findings of questionnaires are more likely to allow us to make accurate generalisations about the wider population.

Advantages of Postal Questionnaires: 
A geographically dispersed sample can be used. Respondents can be selected from anywhere in Britain whereas with any face-to-face method of research, this is both costly and sometimes impracticable.
It also means that a large sample can be contacted cheaply and quickly.
This helps the researcher to create a representative sample from which generalisations can be made.
There is no face-to-face contact between researcher and respondent, removing any "interviewer bias".
Albert Ellis found that people were more likely to admit to socially undesirable attitudes or behaviours with postal questionnaires.
It is a good method for surveying special groups like diabetics or ex soldiers who might be widely dispersed.
This enhances the validity of the data generated.
The survey approach is based on pre-coded questions. Patterns and Correlations can be used. Comparisons between social groups can over time be made so positivists in particular see this as an enormous advantage.
Using fixed response questions makes the whole process more reliable. The survey can be replicated by other researchers and the results verified.