Data collection

Advantages:

• You get a better idea of respondents’ feelings about a question
• You can ask further questions and follow up on ideas your respondents might have

Disadvantages:

• It can be more difficult to categorise results
• Interviews are usually more time consuming than questionnaires

When conducting interviews always:

• Ensure you keep your data anonymous
• Do the same thing for every person you interview
• Be wary of influencing your respondents’ by e.g. your tone of voice, body language or attitude

Tips:

• If possible, record your interviews, this will save you missing what someone is saying because you’re taking notes – Make sure you get permission to do so first.
• Consider how you will structure your interviews. Will they follow a format? How much freedom will you give your respondents?
• Once you have completed all your interviews, go through your recordings, and identify themes.

Advantages:

• You can get many more responses using a questionnaire, as opposed to conducting interviews
• The results are easier to categorise
• You can make use of reporting tools and insights provided by digital questionnaires (Microsoft forms)

Disadvantages:

• You will almost never get back all the responses you ask for
• You may have to send out reminders to receive responses
• They may not allow space for thought or responses outside the scope of the questions asked
• You may not get a good idea o0f the respondent’s feelings about a question or topic

Points to consider:

• Is a questionnaire suitable for your purpose, or would an interview or observation be better?
• It is very important to consider the question types and language used, and how this could influence responses.
• Think about how you will distribute, collect, and analyse responses – what software will you use?
• What do you need to find out? Consult your research questions and make sure your questionnaire answers these
• Draft possible questions and try them out on your friends and see what responses you get.

More structured questions will be easier to analyse.

• Open questions – look for themes when analysing
• Closed questions (yes/no) – are easier to count
• Multiple choice – make sure they are not leading
• Scales – 1 to 5 (1 totally disagree, 5 totally agree)
• Ranking (putting ideas in order)
• Quantity (where the answer is a number)

Example questions

Consider the follow questions and how they could be improved:

1. How old are you: 0-20, 20-40, 40-60

• Notice how the age groups overlap, it should be 0-20, 21-40, 41-60
• There is no provision for over 60s (this may be deliberate)
• Are the age groups too wide? Do they need narrowing down?

2. Do you know who the current Prime Minister is? Yes/No

• The yes/no answer means that we do not know whether the respondent is correct or not
• The question should ask them to state who the current Prime Minister is

3. Do you agree with capital punishment? Yes/No

• This question may be more complex than a yes/no answer
• Someone might wish to answer “Yes, under some circumstances” for example
• It would be better to ask respondents to give their thoughts – think about what meaningful information you would like from your respondents

4. Do you like coming onto campus and eating in the café?

• This is two questions in one
• We should make it into two questions, one about coming onto campus and one about eating in the café

5. How much time do you spend studying? A. a great deal, B. a certain amount, C. not at all

• The options are very vague
• What is meant by “a great deal” for example? It could mean different things to different people
• It would be better to quantify it with a time, for example, 10 hours a week

• Often done in tables/graphs for easy understanding
• The words need only point out main or surprising findings
• The discussion and analysis of your results will be a longer section