How/why can questionnaires cause distress to participants?

Question

Im trying to find out if working class kids fail in education due to external factors for a sociology coursework.

Answer 1

they might be worried about who will be seeing the answers, whether it will be confidential what your going to use it for might be too long

Answer 2

The worst external factor is being branded "working class". What cetury's sociology are you studying? Questionnaires may raise the spectre of history the participant thought had been laid to rest. What's the link between your questions, please?

Answer 3

I do personally believe that external factors contribute to kids failing in education. My parents divorced when i was at school and i feel that this contributed to me not having a stable family background - lack of confidence and basically having to run a household as well as carrying on at school on a day to day basis. Luckily I am a success story and I did well at school and have gone on to success in my personal life.

Answer 4

because they are a pain in the a*se and usually used in some sort of distorted research. first, you have to find out if working kids actually DO fail in education. second, its stupid to make a blanket statement about everyone. third,. sociology sucks rocks and is used to make generalisations about people. find a better hobby. like dancing with chickens.

Answer 5

im not quite--well---oh god, i cant do this, its stressing me out, somebody hand me a cigarette now!

Answer 6

By causing the participants to remember stressful situations, by making them "nervous" because they may feel that their answers can be "wrong", by making them feel guilty about something that is mentioned (same as remembering situations). Any of these can bring distress to a particpant.

Also, depending on how the questions are worded, a particpant can become angry at the question or about the question, sometimes as a resentment surfacing or the "cheek" of the question.

Answer 7

I suppose people are sensetive to stereotypes, esp when you are researching a certain cross section. They might not like the "working class" label.

My friend and I both dropped out of the same course at uni.  6 months later she recieved a letter saying the uni wanted to know why so many students from working class families dropped out.  When they found I hadnt had such a letter her mum went bonkers and rung the uni!  My parents worked in local governement and were quite high up, hers ran a small pub.  They didnt like the label & were really hung up on it.  Not enough to do anything about it though!!!

Answer 8

One way I think Distress can be caused, particularly with kids, if they think that you may let other people (their peers) see their answers to the questionaire. Peer pressure and acceptance is huge for kids, if they think you might not keep their answers confidential they may answer untruthfully.

One way to ease this is to make it a real point that the answers will not be shared with anyone else other than you and your assistants, or something like that. Or make sure to assign each kid a number instead of using their name (if that's possible in this study). Just some ideas. Good Luck with your research.

Answer 9

My personal opinion is that these(all really) children have not been taught to articulate the needed responses found on these types of formats(either through the system or by parents who haven't the ability to do so themselves as well) as well as the questions that are asked tend to psychologically group identities into artificial nonsensical divisions which don't reasonably reflect the individual vs the group intellectual or intuitive levels/responses.