Self-Report Techniques

Questionnaires – a set of written questions (sometimes referred to as items) to

which the participant responds to, used to assess a person’s thoughts and/or
experiences.
A questionnaire may be used in an experiment to assess the dependant
variable. For example, whether views on legalisation of specific recreational
drugs are different in older and younger people.
Questions in a questionnaire can be broadly divided into open questions and
closed questions.
Open questions: does not have a fixed range of answers and respondents are
free to answer in which ever way they wish.
 For example, asking ppts in an energy experiment how they felt during
investigation or why they thought they became more talkative
(assuming they have).
 Open questions tend to produce more qualitative data that is rich in
depth and may be difficult to analyse.
Closed questions: offers a fixed number of responses, questions tend to be
restricted to two options of ‘yes or no’.
 Alternatively, participants can be given a scale from 1-10 for example ow
sociable they felt once consuming the energy drink.
 Closed questions produce numerical data due to limiting the answers
respondents can give
 They tend to produce more quantitative data, this is usually easier to
analyse but it may lack the depth and detail which is associated to open
questions.
Problems with Questions on :
Acquiescence bias: suggests that respondents were not focusing on the
content of the questions but were simply answering at their preferred end
of the scale (which was probably the 'agreement' end). If respondents were
answering truthfully on both occasions, then we would expect a negative
correlation between the two sets of results as the scale for each item had
been reversed.
Social desirability:
 Interviews
Interview – a ‘live ‘encounter where one person a set of questions to
assess an interviewees thoughts/experiences. These may be
conduced over the phone, face to face etc. The questions which are
asked during an interview may be pre-set (structured) or may
develop as the interview goes along (unstructured).
Structured: made up of a pre-determined set of questions that are
asked in a fixed order, its practically like a questionnaire but
conducted between interviewee or interviewer.
AO3:
 They are straight forward to replicate due to standardised
format, format also reduces the differences between
interviewers. Strength == reduces interviewer bias
However, it may be extremely frustrating for interviewees as they
would be heavily restricted and would no be bale to elaborate or
resist the sequence of the interview.
Unstructured: works more like a conversation, no set questions.
There’s usually a general aim that a certain topic will be discussed
and interaction tends to be free-flowing. Interviewee is encouraged
to expand and elaborate their answers as prompted by interviewer.
AO3:
 Much more flexible than structured as it allows the interviewer
to gain a better insight of the interviewee. However the
analysis isn’t straight forward and drawing conclusions may be
difficult as irrelevant info can conceal important details.
As with questionnaires there’s a risk interviewee may lie to gain
social desirability however a skilled experienced interviewer
should be able to establish sufficient rapport with ppt so that
responses are truthful and sincere.