Strengths and Limitations of Questionnaires on Conducting Research

807 Words4 Pages
Assess the strengths and limitations of questionnaires on conducting research. Questionnaires are undoubtedly one of the most successful and popular forms of conducting research today. This can be seen as due to the vast range of advantages that they are able to provide the researcher. However, they also provide limitations in areas such as validity and representativeness due to various factors that I will assess in this essay. Looking at the practicality of questionnaires it is possible at first glance to see many pros in their favour. Firstly, they are flexible in so far that they are able to be conducted face to face, by post, phone or via the internet. Similarly, they are a cheap way of collecting large amounts of data from large numbers of people, and with the people who conduct the research not needing any specific training they therefore also save money. However, this can come as a problem too. Having no power of the success of the questionnaire when sent out to the public means that there are often thousands of questionnaires wasted, proving to be a limitation rather than strength. This is why it is so important to conduct the questionnaire across vast areas of the subject area with thousands at a time in order to guarantee any success and increase relativeness. One huge strength of using a questionnaire though is the fact that it takes significantly less time to create and conduct the research. This therefore definitely provides strength. Using closed questions also means that the data becomes easy to quantify, because they fit into a certain category whereby using open questions would not. However a range of open and closed questions can provide more depth into the subject topic. These practicalities can in some way also affect the validity of the research, with people not being able to express their true opinions upon the subject being researched.
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