Self-report techniques Flashcards
What are self-report techniques?
Research method which requires participants to report on themselves.
What are the strengths of self-report techniques?
Allows more detailed access to participant thoughts and feelings. Enables psychologists to investigate what participants might think, feel or do in the future.
What are the limitations of self-report techniques?
They rely on participants being honest, articulate and insightful which might not always be the case. Participants may feel they need to give socially desirable answers.
What are questionnaires?
A self-report method where participants are presented with a set of predetermined written questions.
What are the strengths of questionnaires?
Can be cost-effective and time-effective since they can be quickly administered to large numbers of participants. When completed privately and anonymously they can provide honest data, improving reliability. The reduced involvement of the researcher lessons the risk of investigator influence on the behaviour of the participants.
What are the limitations of questionnaires?
Response rates can be poor when administered in absence of the researcher. It can be difficult to generalise the findings. It may be that only certain people return them e.g. those who have the time/are motivated so the results may only represent a certain type of person.
It may be difficult to phrase questions in ways that are not open to interpretation by the participants.
What are closed questions?
Questions which allow participants to respond in certain ways.
What are the strengths of closed questions?
Goof when asking questions with finite, clear-cut answers.
Provides control by requiring answer in a particular way.
Require minimum effort yo answer and analyse.
What are the limitations of closed questions?
Have to guess the range of answers. Respondent may have an answer which is not there.
Lack engagement/longer questions cause fatigue.
What are open questions?
Questions in which the respondents are allowed to respond freely and without restriction.
What are the strengths of open questions?
Offers flexibility to the respondent.
Goof way of accessing motivations and feelings.
Researcher isn’t putting ideas to the respondent.
What are the limitations of open questions?
Provide qualitative data is difficult to analyse and is more time consuming. Questions may not e answered in a helpful way e.g. difficult to interpret.
Define interviews?
A self-report method where participants answer questions face-to-face.
What are the strengths of interviews?
A well-conducted interview can address sensitive and complex issues that other methods are unable to do.
Interviews are a good source of qualitative data; descriptive data that relates to how people think and feel about something.
What are the limitations of interviews?
Participant responses can be influenced by the researcher.
Interviews work best with participants who are confident, honest and agriculture.
Interviews are highly dependent on the skills of the interviewer.
