What are the disadvantages of a survey method?

Answer 1

Questionnaires are impersonal, this means that it may be difficult to understand answers and thus to act on them. Also, there is a chance that the question may be misinterpreted, rendering the answer useless.

Questionnaires also invite people to lie and answer the questions very vaguely which they would not do in an interview.

Open questions can take a lot of time to collect and analyze.

People are not always willing to fill questionnaires in so they may just throw them always.

Sometimes questions used are too standardized (closed) so some peoples preferred answers may not be included, and this also does not allow for much detail.

Peer pressure of embarrassment may cause people to not want to answer certain questions, or they may want to impress the researcher and fabricate the truth by filling in untrue answers, making questionnaires unreliable and sometimes invalid.

Some disadvantages of questionnaires:

• Questionnaires, like many evaluation methods occur after the event, so participants may forget important issues.
• Questionnaires are standardized so it is not possible to explain any points in the questions that participants might misinterpret. This could be partially solved by piloting the questions on a small group of students or at least friends and colleagues. It is advisable to do this anyway.
• Open ended questions can generate large amounts of data that can take a long time to process and analyze. One way of limiting this would be to limit the space available to students so their responses are concise or to sample the students and survey only a portion of them.
• Respondents may answer superficially especially if the questionnaire takes a long time to complete. The common mistake of asking too many questions should be avoided.
• Students may not be willing to answer the questions. They might not wish to reveal the information or they might think that they will not benefit from responding perhaps even be penalized by giving their real opinion. Students should be told why the information is being collected and how the results will be beneficial. They should be asked to reply honestly and told that if their response is negative this is just as useful as a more positive opinion. If possible the questionnaire should be anonymous.

Answer 2

Questionnaires are one of the ways of getting responses. However, they pose the following disadvantages; lack personal touch, questions can be misinterpreted, some responses can be hard to understand and respondents may not give responses at all.

Answer 3

For a science project, a high school research team conducted a survey of local air temperatures. Based on the results of the survey, the team found that the average temperatures were around 10 degrees higher than expected. This result was wrong. The trouble with the survey was that most of the locations in the survey were exposed to direct sunlight and over asphalt or sand, which resulted in higher temperatures than normal

Answer 4

One limit of questionnaires is that people may lie when they answer them. People may also not be able to understand what is being asked of them.

Answer 5

One disadvantage to a questionnaire is the fact that you may not get true answers. People may choose any answer because it is a questionnaire.