Questionnaires

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Two competing paradigms of the social sciences—the scientific and the naturalistic—dominate research and have implications for how questionnaires will be designed for case studies. The scientific paradigm views social science as similar to natural science and requires researchers to identify universal and natural laws to explain social behavior; social reality is peripheral to individuals and imposes itself on individuals' awareness. Individuals are controlled by external circumstances and [Page 769]respond to these circumstances in a mechanistic and deterministic manner. Researchers who adopt the scientific paradigm identify and measure the relationships between variables in the environment to determine these variables' influence on individuals. Conversely, the naturalistic paradigm views people as different both from natural phenomena and from each other and requires researchers to search for what is unique to the individual. Social reality is created by the individual and is viewed as personal, subjective, and unique. Individuals control their environment and make choices based on personal experience. Researchers who adopt the naturalistic paradigm are concerned with how individuals create their worlds and how they interpret the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Researchers who use questionnaires to collect case study data will design these questionnaires on the basis of their views of social reality. Those who see reality as existing independent of the knower identify and measure the relationships between variables through standardized questionnaire items that make it possible to summarize, compare, and make generalizations about the influence of the variables on the respondents. For example, a researcher may identify time on task as an important variable that affects children's learning. A questionnaire item may ask all children in a science classroom to respond, on a predetermined response category scale that ranges from strongly agree to strongly disagree, to a statement such as “The more time I spend on a science problem, the more I learn.” Conversely, researchers who want to know how children create a world in which learning occurs may ask the children to respond to a situation in the form of an open-ended statement/question such as “Describe a situation in the science classroom where you believe you learned something important about science. If I were your best friend sitting next to you, what would I have seen you doing? What would you have been thinking?”

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