The Significance of Using Questionnaires in Information Gathering During a Crime

“Violent acts tend to be swift and unexpected. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a researcher to know when and where violent crime is likely to be committed. Of course, it is possible to identify the sort of subcultural groups whose activities involve violence. However, research with such groups or in high-crime areas has a higher level of physical danger for the researcher if thy become too closely involved with the group. It might therefore be useful for the researcher to keep a distance between themselves and the group they are researching. Investigating both perpetrators and victims of violent crime after the event raises problems of cooperation, memory, and ethics. Victims may exaggerate aspects of the crime or may have supresses unpleasant memories. Questionnaires help to maintain a distance from the research group. However, the highly structured nature of questionnaires may limit the responses that perpetrators and victims can give.”

Using material from Item A and elsewhere, assess the strengths and weaknesses of using questionnaires to investigate violent crime.

Questionnaires are a set of printed or written questions with a choice of answers, created for the purposes of a survey or statistical study. The type of questionnaire may vary in order to gain higher validity in regards to violent crime, such as domestic violence. Close-ended questions may be used if the researcher wants a straight forward answer, for example, asking someone whether they have been a victim of crime or whether they have committed crime will provoke a close ended answer, more often used by positivists. Open-ended questions have the opposite effect, in that they allow a broader and more open response e.g. “Tell me about your experience as a victim of gun crime” leading to an open, detailed answer, preferred by interpretivists.

Questionnaires are practical as they are quick and a cheap way to gather large amounts of quantitative data about the number of times a mugging has been committed, but this could be a problem when gathering qualitative data. The discussion of the violent crimes will often involve emotional or broad answers as there are usually reasons behind the crime. For example, giving a questionnaire to convicts and criminals would be a problem as each of them may have an individual response as to why they have committed the crime. This qualitative data when collected will be hard to generalise and come up with an ultimate conclusion lacking validity. Prisoners who commit crimes and are prosecuted are often young lower class males, males who are illiterate and have no background of education. This can be a problem as questionnaires involve a written answer; unfortunately, some might not understand the question and give an invalid answer. Also, the individual definition of what is crime to one criminal may not be classed as crime to another.

As the item states, ‘violent crime tends to be swift and unexpected’, this therefore means that it is extremely difficult to know when and where a violent crime will or has taken place. This means that the researcher will not have direct access to the crime scene, which is a major practical issue which could potentially hold back the research or even lower the validity of the research; this is because the information which will be gathered from the crime scene, a while after the crime has taken place, may not show an accurate reflection of the crime which was committed earlier due to the period of time in between the crime taking place and the time in which the researcher is allowed access to the crime scene. This would therefore lead both positivist and interpretivist sociologists to resort to a more suitable method of researching the violent crime which has occurred. Questionnaires are favoured by both interpretivist and positivist sociologists, but only to a certain extent, in the investigation of violent crimes.

Positivists would favour the use of questionnaires in the investigation of violent crimes, especially the use of questionnaires with closed questions; this is because they have the ability to provide the researcher with quantifiable data which would produce reliable information, such as statistics, which have the ability to be replicated. According to positivist sociologists, producing reliable data which can be replicated will mean that data is correct, and this is the main purpose of a science. Positivists therefore see questionnaires as a valid way of researching into the area of violent crime. However, some sociologists would argue that some questionnaires, especially those with mostly closed questions, cannot be seen as reliable due to the ‘dark side’ of statistics. This is where a number of crimes are not reported and therefore not accounted for, and so the statistics for crime will not show an accurate representation of society, leading some sociologists to reject the use of questionnaires for collecting statistics.

As the item states, ‘questionnaires help to maintain a distance from the research group’, this would therefore mean that if any sensitive topic concerning a recent crime are covered in the questionnaire, the respondent may feel more comfortable completing the questionnaire in private where they do not feel intimidated by the researcher, this could therefore be seen as overcoming the ethical issue of harm to participants. This is therefore a strength of using questionnaires in researching violent crimes. However, other sociologists would argue that even if the respondent, who may be the victim of a violent crime, does complete the questionnaire concerning a violent crime in private, they will still be reliving painful or distressing memories which would raise a number of ethical issues concerning harm to participants.

In conclusion, questionnaires may not be the best way to collect data when researching violent crimes such as theft, rape, or domestic violence. A more suitable way of collecting research could perhaps be open interviews as they offer a broader communication and can better deal with the issues of validity as the researcher is there to break down answers and clarify questions for the participant resulting in a more valid answer. This can be especially helpful for criminals as they tend to have lower literacy levels. Standardised interviews are a good way of making sure the researcher has a good enough sample by monitoring the number of participants and will cost a lot less to produce.