Questionnaires have much strength that helps a research method which the positivists favour. However, for interpretivsts, questionnaires have limitations that don’t help a research method.
A strength for questionnaires for studying parental attitudes is that it isn’t time consuming and costs less money than research methods e.g. interviews. This means that research can targets a large amount of data from parents. However, a limitation for researchers can be to get access to parental access from school. They would need access into the school building and then to access the school records which are private and confidential so even though it is less time consuming it is hard to get the information needed to send out the questionnaires at their addresses. Even once the researcher has sent out the questionnaires, id doesn’t necessarily mean that the questionnaires have reached the parents. Parent may not have filed it in, it could be the another family member which lacks validity because it hasn’t been set out to measure another family members attitudes to education but it has been set out to find out the parents attitudes.
Another strength for questionnaires for studying parental attitudes is that it is quick and easy to fill. This is more effective than other reached methods e.g. interviews. Once the questionnaires are sent out after the researcher has got access to the addresses, it is easy for parents to fill in and return back. This can represent a large number of people in doing so rather than representing a small scale of people e.g. participant observation. However a limitation for this is that some questionnaires may not be returned, or even filled out because it may not have reached to them.
A different strength for questionnaire for studying parental attitudes is that questionnaires are more likely to be anonymous which would makes the parents happy to answer and fill it out because they would know the researcher does not know who answered the set of...