Social Surveys - Questionnaires and Interviews (Part 3) - Disadvantages

General Disadvantages of Questionnaires:
Some practical problems include the fact that data from questionnaires can be limited. The reason for this is that answers have to be fairly brief. This limits the amount of information that can be obtained from each respondent.
Response rate can also be a potential problem especially with postal questionnaires. Hite's study of "love, passion and emotional violence in America" sent out 100,000 but only 4.5% were returned. The people who return the questionnaires are likely to be different than the ones that don't. They may be unemployed or feel strongly about a subject - either way they may skew the results and stop the sociologists from making accurate generalisations.
Inflexibility is another problem because questions are closed ended, so the researcher is stuck with the questions that have been decided and can't explore any new areas of interest. This contrasts with more flexible methods such as unstructured interviews.
Questionnaires as snapshots. They give a picture of social reality from only one moment of time. Questionnaires therefore fail to produce a fully valid picture because they do not capture the way people's attitudes and behaviour change.
Detachment is when interpretivist sociologists such as Cicourel argue that questionnaires lack validity and do not give a true picture of what is being studied. In order to gain a valid picture we need to use methods that allow us to get close to the subject and see the world through their eyes.
Lying, forgetting and "right answerism" is when respondents may give answers that are not full or frank, they may lie, forget, not known, not understand (and not wish to admit they don't understand). They may try to please or second guess the researcher. These problems may be overcome by using observational methods.
Imposing the researcher's meaning: By choosing the question to ask, the researcher rather than the respondent has already decided what's important. Closed ended questions mean the respondent has to fit their view to the ones on offer. The questionnaire imposes a straitjacket that undermines the validity of data (Shipman).


Disadvantages of Postal Questionnaires:
As soon as the questionnaire has been mailed to potential respondents it passes out of the researcher's control. This produces a number of problems.
The most important is the response rate - what proportion are returned? At times this can be as low as a few per cent of the total posted and a response rate of 25% is often considered to be a good high return. It becomes very difficult to control and identify the representativeness of the survey. How does the researcher know whether those returning questionnaires are a cross-section of the research population? It may well be that some kinds of individuals are more likely to return postal questionnaires.
Ornstein and Phillips suggest those who return postal questionnaires will be livelier, more literate and more intelligent sections of the population. This was confirmed by Ognibene who specifically interviewed non-respondents and found they had less schooling and different attitudes than those who replied.
If the sample is not representative, then the capacity of the researcher to generalise from the responses is reduced.
Words used in questions may have different meanings to different individuals and groups. The researcher can never feel completely confident that there will be no misinterpretations of their questions.
Because the researcher is not present when the questionnaire is completed, there is no way of knowing whether the person for whom it was intended actually did fill in the responses. Nor is it possible, without follow-up interviews, to know how well the respondent understood the questions or how accurately they responded.