Zuzanna - you can use qualitative questionnaires - and you have rightly identified that they differ to quantitative survey questionnaires in that they use open questions that 'force' a narrative response. The advantage is that the 'data' is already transcribed. It is not that common a tool to use though, over say qualitative interviewing and observation, for a variety of reasons. People do not always write as richly or expressively as they speak. People often write 'minimal' narrative as it is a lot slower and a harder effort to write narrative. You can often end up with much less data than if interviewing. You may not be able to understand all the hand-writing - especially later questions when participants start to get writer fatigue. The participants may often leave questions that they find too hard, emotional or difficult to understand the meaning unless you are there directly. My argument then would be - why not interview instead?

I have some ideas to share about your question. You have observed that one can use use qualitative questionnaires for open ended questions. I think this true. One of the common tools that you may use for your qualitative data collection is called the Likert Scale, like Likert Scale 5.

AS you may be quite aware of this tool, the Likert Scale may be used to check personal opinions or attitudes or feelings from individual respondents. That is why the responses in this case provide qualitative answers such as Agree, Strongly Agree, No Opinion, Disparage, or Strongly Disagree, in the five scale.

In this case, a questionnaire form is used. It is also important to note that, although the it is a qualitative study, some information will be quantified. For example, the demographic background of the study respondents should be qualified.

These have to do with the respondents' ages, incomes, gender, occupations or employment status, education, social or marriage status, as well as the number of the study participants. The responses are coded and you may be better informed, a computer software package known as SPSS is used for data codding and analysis.

Best regards

Wilson

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I agree with colleagues above. Paper questionnaires for qualitative research is very challenging. If you are collecting qualitative data, you always want your data to be as rich as possible. Interviews (semi-structured) are definitely better. If it is very difficult to arrange face2face interview, you can try telephone interview, or even email interview.

You might look into the literature on using email interviews in qualitative research, which essentially involves giving the questions to participants in order to get written responses.

Thank you for all suggestions. The practice of email interviewing, mentioned by David L Morgan and Lihong Zhou is not too close to me and I am going to to read more about it. It seems to be very helpful in further research projects.

Dean Whitehead, my observation is similar to yours, e.i. I prefer an interview from a questionnaire but recently I had an experience of research project concerning very difficult contact with respondents due to geographical distance. Questionnaire seems to solve the problem of difficult contact, but it causes another problems like poor data. So, there is a choice between one and the other consequence.

I have been using Likert Scale, mentioned by Wilson Truman Okaka but I associate this method rather with a quantitative approach, at least because the scale is usually created by the researcher (after a multistage process of constructing the scale of course) and there is no place for respondents' creativity here, like in qualitative approach where respondents are those who create the reality in a very "ethnographic" sense.

The sample note can be, write the sample and be a quality tool

The relationships between teacher morbidity, performance quality and educational results are preliminarily analyzed in a methodological model that could serve something:

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Another approach to working with widely dispersed participants is to use online interviewing techniques. In the past, this was often done with text-type applications (e.g., instant messenger), but video interviews (e.g., Skype, FaceTime) are becoming more common.

The flexibility of your instrument (Questionnaire Model) with number of closed questions and open-ended questions based on per-determined concepts and specific criteria is a considerable case. This model of questionnaire would give chance to your responders to raise any issues to their concern, mixed feelings and explore line of research in the future.

I believe that interviews are more productive, while the questionnaire model (whether printed or electronic) tends to make people respond less or even say almost nothing of what you need to know.

A structured questionnaire cannot be taken in a exploratory research.Exploratory research has some tools which can be used like PI and Focus group interviews ,case studied etc.These tools are open ended as we are finding or eploring something new from our sample.How can we limit him in a strcutured questionnaire where we compel him to answer only the limited multiple choices that we give.We need something new from him so we have to give him oepn ended questions and record what he says for half an hour ,his feelings,his emotiosn about a topic.

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