Strengths of open questions
-Allow participants to state their attitudes and opinions
-Recall their experiences in their own words
-Useful to capture new ideas from your participants
-Enables you to collect qualitative data
Weaknesses of open questions
-more difficult to draw conclusions because there’s more likely to be a wider range of answers/ responses
-interpreting what people mean is likely to be subjective
Factors that affect the validity
-Length of the questionnaire (lose interest if too long)
- Promise of confidentiality
-social desirability (not truthful)
-Researcher watching participant
-Poorly designed questions
E.g ambiguous/ unclear / vague
Leading ( race,gender )
Participants answers vary from the options available
How to have strong reliability
- standardised questions so questions can be replicated and thus reliability can be checked
-standardised procedures (e.g participants answer the questionnaire in a similar environment, same researcher, same time)
-standard instructions help improve ease of replication and ensure results are reliable
Strengths of closed questions
- Easy to analyse because data is in quantitative (numbers) which can be summarised using averages and simple graphs
-this makes it easier to draw conclusions (e.g because u can make conclusions)
-Answers are more objective because they are more likely to be interpreted in the same way by different researchers.
Weaknesses of closed questions
- May not permit people to express their precise feelings because the researcher determines the choice of answers. So data might lack validity
-They tend not to uncover new insights
-oversimplifies reality and human experiences as it suggests that there are simple answers whereas people are likely to think of
Several answers that reflect their views
Strengths of questionnaires
Respondents record their own answers. The questions are pre-determined (structured) and they are provide in written form so no face to face contact with another person
Self report methods are a means of finding out what people think and feel - not the same for other methods
Can easily be repeated so that data can be collected from large samples
