relative advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of distributing

questionnaires to the respondents of a study.

Ans:
There are some alternative methods of distributing questionnaires to the
respondents. They are:
1) Personal delivery,
2) Attaching the questionnaire to a product,
3) Advertising the questionnaire in a newspaper or magazine, and
4) News-stand inserts.

Personal delivery: The researcher or his assistant may deliver the questionnaires
to the potential respondents, with a request to complete them at their convenience.
After a day or two, the completed questionnaires can be collected from them. Often
referred to as the self-administered questionnaire method, it combines the
advantages of the personal interview and the mail survey. Alternatively, the
questionnaires may be delivered in person and the respondents may return the
completed questionnaires through mail.

Attaching questionnaire to a product: A firm test marketing a product may attach a

questionnaire to a product and request the buyer to complete it and mail it back to
the firm. A gift or a discount coupon usually rewards the respondent.

Advertising the questionnaire: The questionnaire with the instructions for

completion may be advertised on a page of a magazine or in a section of newspapers.
The potential respondent completes it, tears it out and mails it to the advertiser.
For example, the committee of Banks Customer Services used this method for
collecting information from the customers of commercial banks in India. This method
may be useful for large-scale studies on topics of common interest.

Newsstand inserts: This method involves inserting the covering letter,

questionnaire and self addressed reply-paid envelope into a random sample of
newsstand copies of a newspaper or magazine.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

The advantages of Questionnaire are:
This method facilitates collection of more accurate data for longitudinal studies
than any other method, because under this method, the event or action is reported
soon after its occurrence.
This method makes it possible to have before and after designs made for field based
studies. For example, the effect of public relations or advertising campaigns or
welfare measures can be measured by collecting data before, during and after the
campaign.
The panel method offers a good way of studying trends in events, behavior or
attitudes. For example, a panel enables a market researcher to study how brand
preferences change from month to month; it enables an economics researcher to study
how employment, income and expenditure of agricultural laborers change from month
to month; a political scientist can study the shifts in inclinations of voters and
the causative influential factors during an election. It is also possible to find
out how the constituency of the various economic and social strata of society
changes through time and so on.
A panel study also provides evidence on the causal relationship between variables.
For example, a cross sectional study of employees may show an association between
their attitude to their jobs and their positions in the organization, but it does
not indicate as to which comes first - favorable attitude or promotion. A panel
study can provide data for finding an answer to this question.
It facilities depth interviewing, because panel members become well acquainted with
the field workers and will be willing to allow probing interviews.

The major limitations or problems of Questionnaire method are:

This method is very expensive. The selection of panel members, the payment of
premiums, periodic training of investigators and supervisors, and the costs
involved in replacing dropouts, all add to the expenditure.
It is often difficult to set up a representative panel and to keep it
representative. Many persons may be unwilling to participate in a panel study. In
the course of the study, there may be frequent dropouts. Persons with similar
characteristics may replace the dropouts. However, there is no guarantee that the
emerging panel would be representative.
A real danger with the panel method is �panel conditioning� i.e., the risk that
repeated interviews may sensitize the panel members and they become untypical, as a
result of being on the panel. For example, the members of a panel study of
political opinions may try to appear consistent in the views they express on
consecutive occasions. In such cases, the panel becomes untypical of the population
it was selected to represent. One possible safeguard to panel conditioning is to
give members of a panel only a limited panel life and then to replace them with
persons taken randomly from a reserve list.
The quality of reporting may tend to decline, due to decreasing interest, after a
panel has been in operation for some time. Cheating by panel members or
investigators may be a problem in some cases.