“Violent acts tend to be rapid and unexpected. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a researcher to know when and where a violent crime is likely to be committed. Of course, it is possible to identify the type of subcultural groups whose activities involve violence. However, research with such groups or in high crime areas presents a higher level of physical danger to the researcher if he becomes too closely involved with the group. It may therefore be useful for the researcher to maintain a distance between himself and the group he is researching. Investigating both perpetrators and victims of violent crimes after the event raises issues of cooperation, memory, and ethics. Victims may exaggerate some aspects of the crime or have unpleasant memories. Questionnaires help maintain a distance from the research team. However, the highly structured nature of the questionnaires can limit the answers that perpetrators and victims can give.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Obtain an original essay Using material from Article A and elsewhere, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of using questionnaires to investigate violent crimes. Questionnaires are a series of printed or written questions with a choice of answers, created for the purpose of a survey or statistical study. The type of questionnaire can be varied to obtain greater validity with respect to violent crimes, such as domestic violence. Closed-ended questions can be used if the researcher wants a direct answer, for example asking someone if they have been a victim of a crime or if they have committed a crime will elicit a closed-ended response, most often used by positivists. Open-ended questions have the opposite effect, as they allow for a broader, more open-ended response, for example, "Tell me about your experience as a victim of gun crime," which leads to an open-ended, detailed response, preferred by interpretivists. Questionnaires are practical as they are a quick and cheap way to collect large amounts of quantitative data on the number of times a robbery has been committed, but this may present a problem when collecting qualitative data. Discussion of violent crimes often involves emotional or broad responses as there are usually reasons behind the crime. For example, providing a questionnaire to prisoners and criminals would be a problem since each of them could have an individual answer as to why they committed the crime. This qualitative data, once collected, will be difficult to generalize and will come to a definitive conclusion that lacks validity. Prisoners who commit crimes and are prosecuted are often young, lower-class, illiterate, uneducated males. This can be a problem since the questionnaires require a written response; unfortunately, some may not understand the question and give an invalid answer. Furthermore, one criminal's individual definition of what is a crime may not be classified as a crime for another. As the item states, “violent crime tends to be rapid and unexpected,” meaning that it is extremely difficult to know when and where a violent crime will or will have taken place. This means that the researcher will not have direct access to the crime scene, which represents a major practical problem that could potentially slow down the research or even reduce its validity; this is because the information that will be collected at the crime scene, some time after the crime has occurred, may not show an accurate representation of the.