Sociology Quantative Data

* Sociology

Questionnaires, young people, mobile phones.

Using the pre-release material and your wider sociological knowledge , explain and evaluate the usefulness of quantitative date to researching the use of mobile phones in young people’s lives [52]

Quantitative date is information that can be expressed in numerical terms, counted , or compared on a scale.

The advantage of questionnaires are that they are high in reliability thus making it easy to replicate; can obtain similar results. As it is a questionnaire the same one can be given out under the same conditions by a different researcher. It is also produced by a large organisation, which have lots of experience creating questionnaires and therefore the questions are more likely to be objective and less likely to be leading or loaded. The questionnaire being high in validity makes it detached and an objective way of research this makes it easy to measure what they set out to measure; positivist believe this approach. They are also pre determined questions thus making it systematic; all respondents answer the same questions. It then makes it gain some reliability as it can be replicated to a certain extent- Identifying patterns, trends and correlations. An example of this is how important mobile phones are as a part of self expression and therefore more scientific. In the pre-release it states that it has sampled “over 200 schools” this is not including the people that complete questionnaires online over a national representative or large geographical areas. Therefore, it could be argued that this is a representative sample and therefore one could use the findings to generalise about the larger populations, this is called representative. When the questionnaire was taken the children were supervised by their own teachers and were therefore less likely to mess around or not take the questionnaire seriously. As...