Self- Reports.
What are they and how do we carry them out?
Self-reports are basically pieces of information collected by the researcher through the use of Questionnaires and Interviews. They can be used alone or along side studies that to find out specific information in relation to your topic of subject,
Questionnaires can vary in the questions you ask, they can be open or closed and can also use things such as a rating scale.
Open Questions:
♥ these questions allow the participant taking the questionnaire to expand and explain the answer they gave to a question.
♥ An example of an open question would be. What is your opinion on Psychological Studies being carried out on humans?
♥A strength of an open question is that the answers are not fixed-choice answers; respondents can write what ever they want.
♥A weakness of Open Questions is that the data is harder to analyse as the data produced is Qualitative rather than Quantitative.
Closed Questions and Rating Scales
♥ these questions are often very fixed and participants usually either tick boxes or use a rating scale.
♥An Example of a Closed Question would be: Would you Consider doing a Psychology Study? Yes / No/ I Don't Know. Put a ring around one of the choices above.
♥ A strength of closed questions is that the data collected is easy to analyse as the data collected is Quantitative,
♥ A weakness of closed questions is that respondents cant abbreviate on their answer and also the answer can sometimes be forced,
♥ An example of a Rating Scale. is a Likert Scale.
♥ Work Is Successful: strongly agree [] agree [] not sure[] disagree[] strongly disagree[]
♥ A strength of likert scales is that it allows the researcher has an idea about how strongly the participant feels about something and therefore gives more detail than a simple yes or no.
♥ a weakness of likert scales is that the respondents tend to respond towards the middle to make them look less extreme.
Interviews
♥ can also use open or closed question and can also be structured or unstructured.
♥structured interviews have pre-set questions that the interviewer asks. This allows the interview to run smoothly and the researcher gets the answers on the topics he or she wants to know the answers to.
♥unstructured/semi-structured interviews. semi structured interviews still use pre-set questions however like unstructured interviews they are more like a formal conversation about the topics you want to find the answers to as well as a more relaxed feel for the interviewee.
So, I'm just going to run through strengthens and weaknesses of questionnaires and interviews.
interviews
♥ provide large amounts of qualitative data - this enables the researcher to participants experiences, Interviews also are more likely to gain an insight of the participants world and also interviewers can use body language to confirm verbal responses.
♥however interviews can be hard to carry out and may be influenced by interviewer bias. Also there is difficulty in the way that the data is hard to analyse and also the interviews are very lengthy procedures and participants may still answer untruthfully.
Questionnaires
♥record participants experiences and response rates can be high if the questionnaires are given back on the spot. questionnaires can also hold a large sample of the target population and contain topics that are difficult to talk about.
♥however often can be influenced to bias. Questionnaires are also difficult to design well and also response rate can be low if its a postal questionnaire . sometimes the data gathered can be complex and difficult to to interpret and participants may also answer untruthfully,
Finally in any research method you will be looking at weather your research is valid and reliable,
reliability refers to how consistent something is; so for example making sure that all questions on the questionnaire and structured interview are the same for all participants. Validity refers to how accurate something is. so the main problem with validity when carrying out questionnaires is that we cant be certain on weather our participants are telling the truth which makes the results invalid.
P.S , I forgot to mention that Qualitative data is data that is rich in detail and is usually worded rather than numerical data. Quantitative data is data that can be produced into graphs so it is often data that is easily analysed and in the example of self reports usually produced by questionnaires, A good way of remembering these two things is that Qualitative data has Quality and Quantitative data has Quantity,
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Hi to you my Psychology Friends or people interested in psychology. Everything mentioned in this post is from the AS Psychology OCR Specification. For any more information about this course please go on to the OCR website and I Hope you enjoyed reading and revising. If you have further questions please do not hesitate to leave a comment down below or get in touch with me on twiter: @MissSweetlyNat or on Facebook: http://facebook.com/MissSweetlyNat or just type in Miss Sweetly Nat in the search bar.
Thanks
Nat♥
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