Advantages and disadvantages of a questionnaire

1. Advantages and Disadvantages of a Questionnaire
A questionnaire is a useful and helpful way of gathering information efficiently. It’s very easy to
make a questionnaire and hand it out to the general public, however although using a questionnaire
is efficient and can be filled in very quickly; because of this people will often answer a question with
an invalid answer as they want to fill the document in fast because they might be busy, so they don’t
read the question properly. Also a large portion of the people one would often their questionnaire
to, would be too busy to fill it in and therefore that means a potential waste of time and money for
the person who is handing them out.

Advantages
Responses are gathered in a standardised way meaning the process is fast and efficient.
Relatively fast way of gathering information by simply handing pieces of paper to the general public.
Potentially information can be collected from a large portion of a group if you were in the centre of a
busy city like London or Birmingham.

Disadvantages
Low response rate; meaning that people haven’t got the time to fill in the questionnaire.
Often will below 50% of postal therefor not representative, meaning that basically around half of
them won’t get posted back to the association that handed them out.
Respondents may not be able to read the question or potentially not understand it referring to
maybe un-educated people or for example someone with a disability, like dyslexia maybe.
Answers may be incomplete or irrelevant.For example, inputting the wrong answer for the
wrong question, or for someone not being able to understand the question.
Closed questions limit the response of people views/opinions, referring to tick box answers. For
example ‘yes’ ‘no’, ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’.