Self Report Techniques

Question 1

self report techniques

Answer 1

involve a participant reporting their own thoughts and feelings….

• questionnaires
• interviews

Question 2

general evaluation for self report techniques

Answer 2

social desirability bias — involves a distortion in the way people answer questions, they tend to answer in order to appear in a better light, for example when asked whether you’re a leader or a follower many people would prefer not to class themselves as a follower even if they are, this may reduce the internal validity of the findings

allow researchers to discover what people think and feel rather than guess what people think and feel on the basis of how they behave

there is no guarantee that the people being asked questions will give truthful answers which reduces the validity of the results, observations permit much more direct access to genuine behaviours whereas self report techniques give people more opportunity to lie or bend the truth

not very useful for people who lack and understanding or insight into their thoughts and feelings such as children or people with learning disabilities

the sample of people used in self-report methods may not be representative and therefore the data collected cannot be generalised

Question 3

questionnaires

Answer 3

a set of written questions designed to collect information on a topic or number of topics

allow the researcher to discover what people think and feel by asking them directly

questionnaires are always predetermined and structured, may involve…

• open questions — likely to receive a long and opinion based answer
• closed questions — can be answered by a single word or short phrase, usually requires a yes or no response

Question 4

evaluation for questionnaires

Answer 4

it takes a lot of time to design questionnaires and ensure that the questions asked are relevant and will allow the researcher to collect important information

can be used on a large scale because once you have designed and tested a questionnaire, they can be distributed to large numbers of people relatively cheaply and quickly which enables the researcher to collect data from a large sample of people

respondents may feel more willing to reveal personal or confidential information in a questionnaire as they are simply writing down answers rather than in an interview because in an interview, the respondent is aware that the interviewer is hearing their answer and this may make them feel self-conscious and more cautious

the impersonal nature of the questionnaire may also reduce social desirability bias, they simply have to fill in a questionnaire rather than sit and speak with an interviewer

they can only be filled in by people you can read and write and who are also willing to spend time filling them in, which means that the sample is biased

Question 5

open question evaluation

Answer 5

gives more detail as well as insight into opinions and feelings

can generate quite vague and often irrelevant answers

Question 6

closed question evaluation

Answer 6

gives objective facts that are clear and relevant

easy and quick to answer

lacks detail given by open questions

Question 9

interviews

Answer 9

involves real time interaction and spoken questions and answers in order to collect information (can be face to face or over the telephone)

structured interview — pre determined questions decided in advance, no deviation from original questions

unstructured interview — less structure, the interview may begin with general aims and possibly a few predetermined questions but subsequent questions develop during the course of the interview on the basis of the answers given

Question 10

structured interview evaluation

Answer 10

can be easily repeated because the questions are standardised

standardised questions also mean that the answers from different people can be compared, meaning that they are easier to analyse than in an unstructured interview

it may be hard to compare answers in a structured interview because the same interviewer may behave differently on different occasions, therefore they may be producing different answers from the respondents

Question 11

unstructured interview evaluation

Answer 11

more detailed information can be obtained from each respondent then in a structured interview, this is because the interviewer tailors the questions to the specific responses and can get deeper insights into the respondents feelings and thoughts

require interviewers with more skill than a structured interview because the interviewer has to develop new questions on the spot, this makes unstructured interviews more expensive to produce compared with structured interviews which don’t always require specialist interviewers

new questions developed on the spot are more likely to lack objectivity than predetermined ones because of their instantaneous nature

Question 12

interview evaluation

Answer 12

interviewer bias — involves the effect of an interviewer on the respondents behaviour, the interviewers expectations, the way they deliver the question or even their appearance may influence the answers the respondent gives, interviewers must be skilled to prevent interviewer bias as far as possible

Question 13

EXAMPLE: interviews

Answer 13

Kohlberg (1978) used the scenario of a man stealing a drug for his dying wife to investigate moral issues. he used a structured interview to find out answers to some of the following questions…

• should the man have stolen the drug and why?
• does it make a difference whether or not he loves his wife and why?
• suppose the person dying is a stranger, should he steal the drug? why?