Self report techniques

• Interviews: a research method that involves a researcher asking questions to an individual face-to-face to gather information and data.
• Interviewer bias: unconsciously communicated cues to an interviewee about the interviewer’s expected answers. This can come in the form of leading questions.
• Questionnaires: A questionnaire is a research method consisting of written questions that is used to gather information from a large number of people.
• Social desirability bias: when an individual responds untruthfully to questions in order to present themselves in a better light.
• Structured interview: an interview where the questions are pre-written and the interviewer asks the questions in a set order.
• Unstructured interview: an interview beginning with general aims and questions, but questions are asked based on how the individual responds.
• strength of self-report techniques: allow access to what people think and feel as well as their experiences and attitudes.
• limitation of self-report design: participants may not be honest about their behaviour, (social desirability bias) people may not know how they actually feel, individuals could lack representiveness thus cannot be generalised to wider population.
• strength of questionnaires: can be distributed widely and easily, can be anonymous, can be used to compare results. Individuals could feel more obligated to be truthful than in interviews due to privacy and anonymity.
• limitation of questionnaires: sample is biased (only people who have the skill to read and write can do these), some questionnaires can have leading or closed questions - layout of questionnaire is biased towards researcher.
• Meta analysis: a technique used by researchers to combine the results of multiple studies to produce a statistic to represent the overall effect.