Questionnaire usually consist of closed questions meaning that the respondents are given a fixed number of responses to tick however, some of them can include open-ended question.
Sociologists may choose not to use questionnaires because they have many limitations. Questionnaires often lack validity as the researcher would decide beforehand which questions they find important and the use of closed-ended questions restricts what the respondent can say therefore preventing them from expressing their meanings freely, thus undermining the validity. This is the main reason as to why Interpretivist’s reject questionnaires as they do not achieve the main goal of validity. Questionnaires are at risk of the respondents lying and they may give socially desirable answers to portray themselves in a positive light. Although, close-ended questions limit what the respondent can say, they also produce quantitative data meaning they can be analysed quickly and reveal cause-and-effect relationships between different variables.
Questionnaires can collect data from a large number of people meaning it’s more likely to be representative of the wider population. However, questionnaires often suffer from a low response rate due to people not being interested to reply to questionnaires thus meaning that the results may no longer be representative of the research population meaning that we cannot generalise the results.
There is a chance that respondents may interpret the question in a completely different way that was intended by the researcher and because the researcher is not present, they cannot clarify any misunderstandings and misinterpretation of questions is more likely. This means the data produced will be invalid and not accurate. However, because there is no researcher present, it means they cannot influence the respondent’s answers unlike interviews, where interaction with the interviewer may affect the answer given. This means that there is no interviewer bias when filling out a questionnaire. This is why positivist’s favour questionnaires because they are an objective and detached form of research which keeps interaction between the sociologist and respondent to a minimum.
Questionnaires also tend to be limited and superficial. They need to be fairly brief to ensure that respondents complete them since they are unlikely to complete a time-consuming questionnaires. This means that only small amounts of information can be gathered from each respondent. However, questionnaires are seen as reliable as they can be repeated to test whether or not different researchers achieve similar results to those gained by the first researcher.
To conclude, interpretivist’s would choose not to use questionnaires as they are greatly lacking in validity due to close-ended questions, respondent’s lying/giving socially desirable answers and the misinterpretation of questions. Positivists would favour questionnaires as they are often reliable, representative and generalisable.