Using Material from Item B and Elsewhere Assess the Strengths and Limitations of Questionnaires for the Study of Teacher's Attitudes.

Item B states that teachers can be known to judge pupils against the image of the ‘ideal pupil’ and that teacher’s attitudes have an influence on pupil’s grades. However measuring the attitudes of a large group such as teachers is not easy and attitudes are not easy to identify and measure as teachers are used to ‘putting on an act’ in front of pupils, inspectors and others. This makes it difficult to see teachers real attitudes in which would make the results un-true and not fair.
Written questionnaires are the most commonly used form of social survey. They can be distributed to people at home and returned by post or in person, e-mailed or completed and collected on the spot in a classroom or office for example.
Questionnaires ask respondents to provide answers to pre-set questions which tend to be closed-ended often with pre-coded answers but open-ended questions can also be used. Written questionnaires are a cheap and easy way to collect information from large samples of people.

As I said, questionnaires are a quick and cheap means of gathering large quantities of data from a large number of people. There is also no reason to recruit and train interviewers or observers to collect data because respondents complete and return the questionnaires themselves however sometimes it is necessary to offer incentives such as an entry prize draw to persuade respondents to complete the form but this can cost which will make the questionnaires an expensive idea.
Data is usually easy to quantify particularly where pre-coded closed-ended questions are used and can be processed quickly by computer to reveal the relationships between variables however questionnaires have to be fairly brief as many respondents are unlikely to complete and return a long, time consuming questionnaire which limits the amount of information that can be gathered by each respondent in which teachers are often over worked and may be less than fully cooperative which means a questionnaire that is...