What are the advantages and disadvantages of carrying out research using online questionnaires and other online research methods ? Thats the question we have been posed in our December Research Lecture, and not something I had really thought of before, mainly as I don’t do surveys online as find them irritating and not focused on my interests, so hear are my thoughts on that question.
Advantages:
- Cheap, free, or very low price point to create a online survey/questionnaire
- Anyone can set one up, low knowledge required from the tools available to organise.
- Changes can be made constantly, look and feel of them can be adapted.
- Data output, simple, concise and clean.
- None intrusive, either you want to answer or not, partake or not, its your decision.
- Don’t have to reveal identity if taking part.
- No bias, no one can sway the participants answer from a human interaction aspect.
- Questions are the same for all.
Disadvantages:
- Annoying and a pain to answer, say will take five minutes and take 50 minutes.
- Are people answering correctly, or telling you what you want to hear.
- Random answers or just tick as quick as possible, to get the survey done.
- Limited by who you know, if only have a small contact pool then not a large representation.
- Can’t ask what a question really means, the participant may need further clarification and there is no help.
- Response rate will be low, lots of people don’t even open the request.
- Identity, who are the people responding, cant go back and ask them further questions.
Survey’s and the tools available are helpful, sites such as www.surveymonkey.com help enable people to create questionnaires and surveys to take a poll of a participant base, but without the true understanding of how to structure the survey and qualify the questions, I feel the data collected would be limited in its value, and without the ability to go back and re ask or check the responses, limits that data even further.
