Questionnaires and Lived Experience: Strategies of Coping With the Quantitative Frame

Abstract

The article focuses on informants’ interaction with questionnaires as a method of collecting data and analyzes how the informants struggle with the reality imposed on them by the instruments’ items. Focusing on a social psychological questionnaire used to explore experience, the authors challenge the link between the data that are collected and what is concluded from them, and particularly the notion that such conclusions offer insight into informants’ experiences. The data the article is based on come from a session in which informants were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to examine feelings and behaviors after a job loss and to “think aloud” while doing it. The authors describe three strategies of dealing with the questionnaire frame: rejecting it, constructing experience in a way that matches the instrument, and, finally, reformulating the questionnaire’s questions. The article concludes by arguing that the process of filling in a questionnaire results in the experiences that the instrument is designed to examine being made irrelevant and their complexity far too great for a-contextual quantification.