Limitations To Questionnaires

2250 Words9 Pages
Using material from Item A and elsewhere assess the strengths and limitations of questionnaires for the study of parental attitudes to education. [20] Firstly, the item claims ‘sociologists are interested in what these attitudes are and how they affect achievement.’ For sociologists, particularly positivists, questionnaires have many strengths that warrant them a useful research method when studying parental attitudes. However, for interpretivists the limitations of this method make it fairly useless as complex issues like this one require deep and meaningful studies. This essay will assess these strengths and weaknesses to conclude the suitability of the use of questionnaires when studying parental attitudes to education. One of the major strengths of questionnaires is their practicality. The fact that they are cheap and easy to create means that sociologists can target a high number of parents in a small time frame. For example, Rutter used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner London secondary schools in which he correlated achievement, attendance and behaviour with variables like class size. This was simple to do unlike a method like observation which would be extremely time consuming. Time is also saved as researchers would not need to recruit people to talk to the parents individually. Also, because schools already keep sampling frames, all the researcher would need to do is choose which parents they would like to target, rather than use time creating the frames themselves. However, the problem with this, as highlighted by the item, is that ‘researchers cannot easily access a school’s database of parents.’ With schools commitment to confidentiality, it means that despite questionnaires being less time consuming and simple to distribute, the researcher needs access before they can make use of the practical advantages. Thus,
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