Blog Homework!!- Research methods 1.

1.“The popularity of questionnaires is undoubtedly due to to the considerable range of advantages they offer to researchers” – Discuss
- Questionnaire is a form of questions produced by researchers to ask for respondents' opinions,in which responses can be provided though alternatives or respondents can answer in their own words. Undoubtedly,questionnaire is a common and popular way to collect data and informations as what we can see always from schools or those assignned by people in the streets.
Considering the usefulness of questionnaire as a whole,they tend to be desighed as quantitative data which is easier to see the preference of respondents and to compare and code the answes into different categories. Compared to other research method like experiments or observations,it takes less time cost less money of the researchers.

However,whether the questionnaires are good or not should depend on different types of questionnaires and distinct types of questions they use. There are two types of questions used in questionnaires,they are,closed questions and open questions. Closed questions are more likely to be seen that the range of responses is fixed by researchers and respondents have to choose from the alternatives(tend to be quantitative data). This type is less time-consuming,cost less money and easier to discover correlation between variables and to be coded. But it can't provide more details and depth to explain the respondents' behaviour or ideas. In contrast,open questions (quanlitative data) allow respondents to answer questions in their own words which provides more scope and detailed pictures. But it is not preferred by respondents for that it's complicated to answer and takes longer time to think about. Therefore,sometimes the data may not be valid as respondents may aim to finish them quickly without thinking carefully.

Besides,self-complete questionnaires and structured interviews questionnaires have different advantages and disadvantages.Self-complete questionnaires can be postal questionnaires that they are more efficient by sending questionnaires to a large number of people in the same time and cost less money. Furthermore,they can explore some questions of embarrasing areas because the respondents will not meet with the researchers. But on the other hand,the respondense rate is relatively low and sometimes the respondents may not understand the questions because of low literacy. Also,the answers can be fake,invalid. Opposite to that,questionnaires of structured interviews have high respondense rate and respondents can fully understand the questions with the help of interviewers but it costs more money,more time and the anwers may include bias.

What's more? There is a difficult problem involved -operationalising concepts. This part is significant for designing questions and sometimes researchers find difficult to reach an agreement of the form of measurement to replace the concepts. The inaccuracy operationalising questions may affect the validity of answers. But the pilot study can be used to identify some proplems of the questionnaires.

Overall,questionnaires contain a considerable range of advantages like less time-consuming,less cost,easier to get a conclusion but also involve some problems which researchers should consider with caution. Besides,the benefits depend on which type of questionnaires is used.











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