Self-report Techniques Flashcards
What are self report techniques?
Any method in which a person is asked to state or explain their feelings, opinions, behaviours and/or experiences related to a given topic
What is a questionnaire?
A set of written questions (sometimes referred to as items) used to assess a person’s thoughts and/or experiences.
What is an interview?
A ‘live’ encounter (face to face or on the phone) where one person (the interviewer) asks a set of questions to assess an interviewee’s thought and/or experiences
What is a structured interview?
The questions are preset
What is an unstructured interview?
The questions may develop as the interview goes along
What is an open question?
Open questions allow participants to answer however they wish, and thus generate qualitative data since there is no fixed number of responses to select from.
Open questions evaluation:
STRENGTH- since the participant can answer the questions in their own words, there is less chance of researcher bias.
WEAKNESS- participants may answer in a socially desirable way, meaning that the response may lack validity.
What are closed questions?
Closed questions restrict the participant to a predetermined set of responses and generate quantitative data. There are different types of closed questions, including: checklist, Likert response scale and ranking scale.
Closed questions evaluation:
STRENGTH- the nature of the data collected is quantitative. This means the researcher can look for patterns and trends in the data that can lead to further research being conducted.
WEAKNESS- the researcher is unable to pursue and explore responses that are of particular interest. Additionally, closed questions often produce a response bias. (for example, selects ‘yes’ for each of their answers) This means that the data generated may lack internal validity.
Structured interview evaluation:
STRENGTH- The quantitative (numerical) data is easier to statistically analyse. Additionally, because the questions are standardised, the interview is easily replicable to test for reliability.
WEAKNESS- It is possible that over the course of running several interviews following the same schedule with different participants, that investigator effects may play a role.
Unstructured interview evaluation:
STRENGTH- The use of unstructured interviews can increase the validity of findings by significantly reducing the possibility of investigator effects.
WEAKNESS- However, unstructured interviews are more time consuming and costly, as this type of interview requires a trained psychologist to administer them.
What should you remember when writing good questions?
Overuse of jargon, emotive language and leading questions, double barrelled questions
What’s a correlation?
Correlational techniques are non‐experimental methods used to measure how strong the relationship is between two (or more) variables. In correlational studies the movement and direction of co‐
variables in response to each other is measured.
What are the 3 types of correlation?
Positive correlation: As one variable increases the other variable increases.
Negative correlation: As one variable increases the other variable decreases.
Zero correlation: occurs when a correlational study finds no relationship between variables.
What’s a correlation coefficient?
A correlation coefficient is used to measure the strength and nature (positive or negative) of the
relationship between two co‐variables. The correlation coefficient number represents the strength of the relationship and can range between ‐1.0 and +1.0. The nearer the number is to +1 or ‐1 the stronger the correlation.
