Questionnaires in Sociology: Strengths and Weaknesses

Last Updated on October 7, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Questionnaires are one of the most common ways of collecting quantitative data in sociology. They are popular with positivists because they can reach large numbers of people quickly and cheaply, and because everyone answers the same questions in the same order. That makes the data easy to compare and the research easy to repeat.

This post covers:

1. What a questionnaire is, and the main types: self-completion (postal, online, handed out) and researcher-administered
2. The theoretical strengths and weaknesses of questionnaires: representativeness, reliability, validity and the imposition problem
3. The practical strengths and weaknesses: time, cost, response rates and incentives
4. The ethical strengths and weaknesses: consent, anonymity and sensitive topics
5. Two exam practice questions with model answers

Questionnaires are part of the research methods module of A-level sociology. Research methods come up on Paper 3 (Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods) and Paper 1 (Education with Theory and Methods).

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Questionnaires in Sociology – Summary

A questionnaire is a written list of questions used to collect data from large numbers of people in a standardised way. Most use closed questions (Yes/No, multiple choice or Likert scales), though some include open questions where respondents write their own answers. Questionnaires are mainly used by positivist sociologists, who prefer quantitative, reliable and objective data.

Two well-known examples are the England and Wales Census, which goes to every household every ten years, and the British Social Attitudes Survey, which explores public attitudes on issues such as gender, class and politics.

	Strengths	Weaknesses
Theoretical	Representative – large samples can be generalised from. Reliable – easy to repeat and compare. Objective – the researcher stays detached. Good for testing hypotheses about cause and effect. Good for trends and comparisons over time	Low validity – little depth or Verstehen. The imposition problem – the researcher decides what matters. Respondents may misinterpret questions or give socially desirable answers. Low response rates and self-selecting samples reduce representativeness
Practical	Quick and cheap for large samples. Can reach people spread over a wide area by post or online. People are used to filling them in. Large data sets make funding easier to get. Little training needed; data is quick to quantify	Questionnaires have to be short, so the data is superficial. Incentives may be needed to get them returned. They exclude people who can’t read well or aren’t online. Using interviewers to fix response rates makes them far more expensive
Ethical	Informed consent is usually obvious. Easy to ignore, so not intrusive. Anonymity and confidentiality are easy to guarantee, which can help with some sensitive behaviour	A tick-box format suits emotional or distressing topics badly. They can exclude vulnerable groups. Describing the research purpose vaguely to avoid biasing answers edges towards deception

The rest of this post covers the above in more depth.

Types of Questionnaire

Self-completion questionnaires

With a self-completion questionnaire the respondent fills in the answers themselves, without a researcher present. There are three common ways of doing this:

• Postal questionnaires are sent to people’s homes with a return envelope. They can reach anyone with an address, but they are notorious for low response rates.
• Online questionnaires are emailed out or posted on a website. They are the cheapest of all, and answers to closed questions can be analysed automatically as they come in. HOWEVER, they exclude people who aren’t online, and the researcher has even less idea who is actually completing them.
• Handed-out questionnaires are given to a group in one place, such as a class of pupils, and collected straight away. This usually produces a high response rate because the respondents are a captive audience.

Most of the strengths and weaknesses in this post apply mainly to self-completion questionnaires. The detachment of the researcher is behind both their main advantages (reliability, objectivity, low cost) and their main problems (no chance to clarify questions, low response rates).

Researcher-administered questionnaires

When a researcher reads the questions out and records the answers, the questionnaire becomes a structured interview. This can be done face to face or by phone. Structured interviews get better response rates and let the interviewer clarify questions, but they cost far more and introduce interviewer bias. They are covered in their own post: Structured Interviews in Social Research.

For the difference between closed and open questions, and between questionnaires and the wider category of social surveys, see Social Surveys in Sociology.

Theoretical Strengths of Questionnaires

Detachment and Objectivity

Positivists favour questionnaires because they are a detached and objective (unbiased) method. The sociologist’s personal involvement with respondents is kept to a minimum, so the researcher’s own values have little chance to shape the answers people give. Positivists argue that this makes the data more valid, at least for straightforward facts such as age, qualifications or how many hours someone works. Interpretivists disagree, for the reasons covered under the weaknesses below.

Hypothesis Testing

Questionnaires are particularly useful for testing hypotheses about cause and effect relationships between variables, because quantifiable answers allow us to look for correlations.

For example, government statistics on educational achievement show that white boys on Free School Meals achieve at a significantly lower level than Chinese girls on Free School Meals. One hypothesis is that differences in parental involvement explain part of this gap. This might be how much time parents spend helping with homework, how often they talk to teachers, or whether they expect their child to go to university. A well-designed questionnaire and a good sample would let us test this. Good sampling would further allow us to see whether white working-class boys who do well have parents who behave in similar ways to the parents of Chinese girls who do well.

Representativeness

Questionnaires allow the researcher to collect information from a large number of people, so the results should be more representative of the wider population than with more qualitative methods. HOWEVER, this all depends on appropriate sampling techniques being used, and on the researcher knowing who actually completes the questionnaire. For more on this, see my post on sampling methods.

Reliability

Questionnaires are generally seen as one of the more reliable methods of data collection. If another researcher repeats the research, it should give similar results. There are two main reasons for this:

• When the research is repeated, it is easy to use exactly the same questionnaire. Respondents are asked the same questions in the same order with the same choice of answers.
• With self-completion questionnaires, especially those sent by post, there is no researcher present to influence the results.

The reliability of questionnaires means that if we do find differences in answers, we can be reasonably confident that they reflect real changes in people’s opinions over time. For this reason, questionnaires are a good method for longitudinal research, where change over time is measured.

Theoretical Weaknesses of Questionnaires

Most of the criticisms below come from interpretivists, and they are mainly about validity.

The Imposition Problem

The imposition problem happens because the researcher chooses the questions, so they are deciding what is important rather than the respondent. With closed questions, the respondent also has to fit their answers into the options on offer. The result is that respondents may not be able to express themselves in the way they want to. The structure of the questionnaire distorts their meanings and undermines the validity of the data.

Misinterpretation of Questions

Interpretivists argue that the detached nature of questionnaires and the lack of contact between researcher and respondent means there is no way to guarantee that respondents interpret the questions in the same way as the researcher. This is especially true for complex topics. If I tick ‘yes’ to being a Christian, this could mean anything from being baptised but not practising, or not really believing, to being a devout fundamentalist. For this reason interpretivists usually prefer qualitative methods, where the researcher is present to clarify meanings and probe deeper.

With self-completion questionnaires, researchers also aren’t present to check whether respondents are giving socially desirable answers, or simply lying. They can’t even check who is actually completing the questionnaire. With interviews, at least the researcher is there to pick up on these problems, by watching body language or probing further.

Low Response Rates and Self-Selecting Samples

Postal questionnaires in particular can suffer from a low response rate. A famous example is Shere Hite’s study of women’s love relationships, published as Women and Love (1987). Hite distributed 100,000 questionnaires, mainly through women’s organisations, and got around 4,500 back, a response rate of 4.5%. Critics pointed out that women who bother to fill in a long questionnaire about their relationships are probably not typical of women in general.

All self-completion questionnaires also suffer from the problem of a self-selecting sample, which makes the research unrepresentative. Certain types of people are more likely to complete questionnaires: people who read well, people with plenty of time, or people who get a positive sense of self-esteem from completing them.

Self-selection in action: the Global Drug Survey

The Global Drug Survey is an annual online questionnaire about drink and drug use. Anyone who wants to can take part. In 2019 more than 120,000 people from over 30 countries completed it, and UK respondents said they got drunk 51 times in the previous year, against an average of 33 across all respondents.

It would be easy to read that as “British people get drunk once a week”, and several newspapers did. HOWEVER, those are figures for the people who chose to fill the survey in, not for the population. The people who complete a long online questionnaire about drug use are disproportionately young, clubbing and drug-using. The organisation itself says its sample is not representative of the wider population. It recruits heavy users on purpose, because its aim is to spot new drug trends and harms early, not to measure how common drug use is.

So the survey is useful for some purposes, such as what experienced drug users are doing and what problems they run into. It is useless for others, such as estimating how many people in Britain take drugs. That distinction is exactly the one you need to make when evaluating the representativeness of any self-completion questionnaire.

The Covid-19 pandemic reduced the representativeness of many government surveys

Several government departments carry out annual surveys of the population using random samples of addresses. Advance letters are sent out, and it is then up to interviewers to persuade those selected to take part. With these surveys, interviewers are not allowed to go next door if one address refuses.

[IMAGE: retain existing national-travel-survey-response-rate.png. Alt text: “National Travel Survey response rate 2013 to 2022 – declining survey response rates in sociology”]

For example, the Department for Transport carries out the National Travel Survey every year, with a sample of around 12,800 households. When the pandemic stopped face-to-face interviewing in 2020, interviewers had to rely on telephone interviews instead, and the response rate fell to just 16%. From 2021 interviewers went back to knocking on doors to encourage people to take part over the phone, and the rate recovered to 38%. By 2022 it was 31%, a long way down from 54% in 2019.

The same trend has happened with other government surveys. It seems the pandemic made people more reluctant to take part. Strictly speaking, the National Travel Survey uses interviews and a travel diary rather than a postal questionnaire, but it shows how quickly response rates – and so representativeness – can fall.

Practical Strengths of Questionnaires

Questionnaires are a quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numbers of people, even if they are widely spread out, as long as the questionnaire is sent by post or done online. It is difficult to see how any other research method could provide tens of millions of responses, as the UK national Census does.

In the context of education, Connor and Dewson (2001) used a postal questionnaire to study the factors influencing working-class students’ decisions to go to university. They sent it to students at 14 higher education institutions in England and Wales. Just over 1,600 replied, a response rate of 41%, so nearly 4,000 questionnaires must have gone out. That is a large sample for a government-funded study, but it is also a reminder that even a well-run postal survey can lose more than half its sample.

With self-completion questionnaires there is no need to recruit and train interviewers, which reduces cost. The data is quick to analyse once it has been collected, and with online questionnaires, pre-coded answers can be analysed as they come in.

Because questionnaires produce large, generalisable data sets, they also make it easier to get funding. Government departments in particular want data they can use to plan policy.

Practical Weaknesses of Questionnaires

The fact that questionnaires need to be brief means you can only ever get relatively superficial data from them. For many topics, they will need to be combined with more qualitative methods to get more insight.

Although questionnaires are a relatively cheap way of gathering data, it might be necessary to offer incentives for people to return them.

Self-completion questionnaires also exclude people who struggle to read, and online questionnaires exclude people who aren’t online.

The obvious fix for low response rates and misunderstood questions is to send interviewers to ask the questions in person. HOWEVER, structured interviews are considerably more expensive than self-completion questionnaires, so this fix removes much of the method’s practical advantage.

Ethical Strengths of Questionnaires

When a respondent is presented with a questionnaire, it is fairly obvious that research is taking place. So informed consent isn’t normally an issue, as long as researchers are honest about the purpose of the research.

It is also a relatively unobtrusive method, given the detachment of the researcher, and it is easy for respondents to just ignore questionnaires they don’t want to complete.

Anonymity and confidentiality are easy to guarantee, because no one needs to give their name and no researcher sees them answer. This can make questionnaires a better choice than face-to-face methods for asking about behaviour people would be reluctant to admit to someone’s face, such as truanting or illegal drug use.

Ethical Weaknesses of Questionnaires

Anonymity helps with embarrassing behaviour, but it doesn’t make a questionnaire suitable for emotional or distressing topics. A closed questionnaire about the impact of domestic violence on victims would be a little cold! Topics like this need the trust and sensitivity that only face-to-face methods can provide, and a researcher present to respond if someone becomes upset.

Questionnaires can also exclude vulnerable groups, such as people with low literacy or people without a fixed address, whose experiences may be exactly what the research needs.

Finally, researchers sometimes describe the purpose of a questionnaire in vague terms, so that knowing the hypothesis doesn’t bias the answers. Done carefully this is acceptable, but it edges towards deception, and it sits uneasily with informed consent.

Exam Practice: Questionnaires and Social Surveys

Below are two 10-mark questions on social surveys. These could appear on Paper 3 or Paper 1 of the AQA A-level sociology exam, as a ‘pure’ research methods question with no item.

These are practice questions in the AQA format, not questions from a past paper. Try writing your own answer before reading mine – everything you need is in the post above.

There are no marks for evaluation on the no-item 10-mark questions. The marks go for knowledge and for developing each point. Any evaluation you add earns nothing, so spend the time developing your two points instead.

Question 1: Outline and Explain Two Practical Advantages of Using Social Surveys in Social Research (10)

Model answer

Firstly, surveys are a quick and cheap means of gathering data from large numbers of people across wide areas. Once sent out, millions of people could potentially fill them in at the same time.

They are especially quick and efficient if put online, because computers can analyse pre-coded answers and quantify and compare the data instantly.

They also make it easier to get government funding, because you can generalise from large data sets and use them to inform social policy. The Census, for example, allows the government to plan for school places in the future.

However, interpretivists would argue that you never get in-depth, valid data with this method, so predictions can be flawed. A poll can tell you how many people say they will vote a certain way, but not why, or whether they will actually turn out.

Secondly, you don’t need ‘people skills’ to use social surveys, so anyone can use them to do research.

This is because they can be written in advance and put online or sent by post, so the sociologist’s personal involvement with respondents can be kept to a minimum.

This also means that busy researchers with family commitments can easily use social surveys.

However, interpretivists and feminists argue this wouldn’t be an advantage for all topics. Some areas, such as domestic abuse, are so sensitive that they require personal contact.

Question 2: Outline and Explain Two Theoretical Problems of Using Social Surveys in Social Research (10)

Model answer

Firstly, social surveys suffer from the imposition problem. Closed questions limit what respondents can say. Interpretivists argue that respondents have diverse motives, and it is unlikely that researchers will think up every relevant question and every possible response, so questionnaires will lack validity.

This is especially true for more complex topics such as religious belief. Ticking the ‘Christian’ box can mean many different things to different people, for example.

Interpretivists therefore argue that survey data partly reflects the researcher’s categories rather than the respondent’s own meanings.

However, this can be reduced by including a section at the end of the questionnaire in which respondents can write their own explanations.

Secondly, self-completion surveys can suffer from poor representativeness.

Postal questionnaires can have a low response rate, and samples might be self-selecting. People who struggle to read, or who are ashamed or scared to return questionnaires on sensitive topics, are less likely to respond.

Also, you can’t check who has filled them in, so surveys may actually misrepresent the target population.

However, it is possible to reduce this with incentives and booster samples.

KT’s Commentary

Both answers follow the formula I’ve always found works for ‘pure methods’ 10-markers: make the point, develop it twice, and move on. That’s where the marks are.

You’ll notice that each point ends with a ‘However…’ sentence. On a no-item 10-marker those sentences earn nothing. I’ve left them in because this was how I used to teach it, and they don’t cost you marks. But if you’re short of time, cut them and put another sentence of development in their place.

The second answer is stronger on the first point than the second. ‘Representativeness’ is a theoretical issue, but a lot of what makes postal surveys unrepresentative is practical (people just don’t send them back). A sharper answer would tie the low response rate directly to the claim positivists want to make: that the findings can be generalised.

For more examples of theory and methods questions and answers, please see my exams page.

Theory and Methods A-Level Sociology Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Theory and Methods Revision Bundle, specifically designed to get students through the theory and methods sections of A-level sociology Papers 1 and 3.

[IMAGE: retain theory-methods-revision-cover.png, linked to https://revisesociology.sellfy.store/p/2qyB/. Alt text: “Theory and methods A-level sociology revision bundle cover”]

Contents include:

1. 74 pages of revision notes
2. 15 mind maps on various topics within theory and methods
3. Five theory and methods essays
4. ‘How to write methods in context essays’

References

• Bryman, A. (2016) Social Research Methods (5th edition). Oxford University Press.
• Connor, H. and Dewson, S. with Tyers, C., Eccles, J., Regan, J. and Aston, J. (2001) Social Class and Higher Education: Issues Affecting Decisions on Participation by Lower Social Class Groups. DfEE Research Report 267. Report summary.
• Department for Transport (2023) National Travel Survey 2022: Quality Report.
• Global Drug Survey (2019) GDS2019 Executive Summary; Methods and limitations.
• Hite, S. (1987) Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress. Knopf.

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the research methods module, as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course.

Before reading this post you might like to read Social Surveys in Sociology, which defines social surveys and the different types of question.

After questionnaires, students usually study Structured Interviews in Social Research, the other main way of administering a social survey.

Positivists like the survey method. For more on why, see Positivism, Sociology and Social Research and Positivism and Interpretivism in Sociology.

To apply questionnaires to education for the methods in context question, see Using self-completion written questionnaires to investigate unauthorised absences from school and Evaluate the strengths and limitations of using questionnaires to investigate the role of parents in pupils’ achievement.

Please click here to return to the research methods page, or to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com