self report techniques

• what are 2 types of self report techniques?

  1. questionnaire
  2. interview
• what is a questionnaire?

  involves asking a number of people about a specific topic to investigate their views, opinions, feelings , attitudes
• what are open questions?

  allows participants to write their own answer

  produces qualitative data
• what are closed questions?

  the participants choose their response from a limited number of fixed responses pre determined by researcher

  produces quantitative data
• what are interviews?

  type of survey

  gathers more detailed information & enable a more natural/flexible approach to questioning
• what are structured interviews?

  interviewer will mostly ask pre determined questions but may ask follow up questions to clarify a reponse

  can be open or closed
• what are unstructured interviews?

  interviewer will have few pre determined questions

  this is more like a conversation

  mostly open questions
• * efficient way of collecting data for questionnaires?

  can be mass produced, quick for participants to complete & can be analysed easily

  * population valid - more representative so findings can be generalised to target population
• name 2 weaknesses of questionnaires?

  1. suffer from social desirability
  2. sample may be unrepresentative due to sampling biases
• X suffer from social desirability for questionnaires?

  respondents may try to create a favourable impression of themselves

  ? internal valid - may not be able to generalise findings to other members of population outside of research context if results given are not based on honest answers
• X unrepresentative sample for questionnaires?

  certain subgroups of people are more likely (unemployed/elderly) or less likely (young children/students) to respond

  ? population valid - there may not be a variety in sample of participants who take part & so findings cannot be generalised
• * detailed info obtained for interviews?

  combo of structured & unstructured interviews encourages participants to be honest & allow them to express themselves whilst at same time allowing researcher to analyse responses using graphs

  * valid - the more data & rich detail that can be obtained the better the accuracy of results
• name 2 weaknesses of interviews?

  1. more time consuming
  2. analysis of data
• X time consuming for interviews?


  interviews require transcribing which takes many hours

  analysis of qualitative data will take long time

  ? valid - there are more efficient methods to collect a larger amount of data

  can also be costly
• X analysis of data?

  can be more difficult to statistically analyse data from unstructured interviews as it tends to be qualitative

  is subjective & harder to analyse

  ? valid - can be difficult to draw conclusions from & can prevent results being generalised to explain target populations behaviour