Questionnaires

As a Research Method for researching Crime & Deviance

• Practical Issues

• Ethical Issues

• Representativeness

• Validity

• Example

• Reliability

• Theoretical Issues (positivist or interpretivist)

• Evaluate

• Data (quantitative or qualitative)

• CAM: compare another method

Practical Issues

• Quick and cheap way to gather large amounts of

quantitative data

• Data is usually easily quantifiable, test the hypothesis and

can discover cause-and-effect relationships

• Data only provides a snapshot & they are inflexible (cannot

gain in depth information). Questions may need to be short

and simple as criminals may have a low literacy level

• The formal nature of this method could mean criminals

identify it with authority. For example, Venkatesh asked

how it felt to be poor and living with violence and was kept

at gunpoint in case he was the police

Ethical Issues

There are few ethical issues using questionnaires. However, it

would be necessary to gain informed consent from U16s so

they are usually excluded from research despite being vital

when studying crime and victimisation. Also, it is inappropriate

to ask young people about certain topics, such as sexual

crimes due to distress. To compensate, researchers tend to

ask older respondents about when they were younger so this

is reliant on memory and could reduce validity.

Representativeness

Questionnaires are likely to produce representative results

because they can be conducted on a large scale and use

representative samples. However, criminals who weren’t

convicted are unlikely to be included in any sampling frames.

Also, questionnaires tend to have a low response rate from

criminals. Junger-Tas suggests this is because people

involved in law-breaking activities may not wish to respond

because they see it as sent from someone in authority.

Validity

Questionnaires don’t always produce valid data. People may

conceal information or lie (‘right answerism’). Also,

researchers meanings may be imposed through the wording

and the choice of the questions. For example, Ditton et al

argue victim surveys on ‘fear of crime’ reflect government and

media agendas so don’t uncover real public concerns. As a

result, questionnaires may include the wrong questions.

It is a detached method, so interpretivists argue

questionnaires fail to produce a valid picture of actor’s

meanings.

Example

Self-completion questionnaires are popular method for

researching ethnic differences within crime. They have

revealed smaller gaps between offending rates of different

ethnic groups than suggested by official statistics. However,

such questionnaires tend to not ask about more serious

offences, where there is evidence of a higher rate of

offending by blacks and they exclude prisoners so they

under-represent non-white offenders. Hindelang et al found

that black males with criminal records were less likely to

report offences already known to the police.

Reliability

The questionnaire is a standardised measuring instrument so

this method can be regarded as reliable because we can

make comparisons. However, different questionnaires aren’t

always comparable due to differences in opinion about what

crimes to include.

Theoretical Issues

Positivists prefer the use of methods such as questionnaires

because they produce representative and reliable quantitative

results. They believe the detachment avoids the researcher

contaminating the subject matter.

On the other hand, interpretivists dislike questionnaires

because they don’t believe they produce a valid picture of the

actors meanings because people can lie/forget/try to impress

(risk of Hawthorne Effect) and the detachment and inflexibility

means researchers can’t probe.

Data

Questionnaires produce quantitative data.