Self Reports

A self report is a method which asks participants to report their own feelings or beliefs about something. For example, it may ask them their opinions on smoking, or how much they remember about a certain event.

Self reports can take the form of interviews or questionnaires.

Questionnaires

A questionnaire is a set of carefully produced questions that are designed to investigate something in particular (eg. attitudes towards war; personalities; memory etc.). It is sometimes called a survey, and is a descriptive method, as it does not try to explain the causes of participants’ responses, it just describes them.

Interviews

An interview usually takes place face-to-face (but can be conducted online or over the phone) and consists of the researcher asking the participant about the topic under investigation.

Structured Interviews

Where a researcher has a set of standardised questions and only asks these during the interview, this is known as a structured interview.

Unstructured Interviews

Where the researcher goes into an open discussion with the participant, with no pre-defined questions, this is known as an unstructured interview.
However, the researcher will still ask questions to prompt the participant.

Types of Questions

Questions can take a number of forms (examples are in italics):

Open Questions

An open question is one that requires a detailed response with no choices given.

Closed Questions

A closed question is one that gives a number of possible answers which participants choose from, and includes rated questions.

1.

I love cheese

True

False

2.

Cheese is more important than money.

Agree

Disagree

3.

Do you eat cheese?

Yes

No

Rated Questions

Rated questions offer a number of answers, each of which has a numerical value so that the participant’s responses can be turned into a score at the end.

1.

Cheese is the most important thing in my life.

 

agree strongly
+2

agree
+1

neither agree nor disagree
0

disagree
-1

disagree strongly
-2

 

THIS IS CALLED A LIKERT SCALE

2.

Where 1 is not important and 5 is very important, please rate the following statements:

 

Cheese must be in a nice packet

1

2

3

4

5

 

 

Cheese must be cheap

1

2

3

4

5

 

3.

Please tick the box that is closest to your feelings about the following:

 

Acceptable

Unacceptable

 

1

2

3

4

5

 

No cheese ever again

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smelly cheese only

 

 

 

 

 

 

On psychology exams you may well be asked to describe the use of rated questions, so it is worth taking the opportunity to try them all out in a questionnaire. Normally you would only choose one style of rated question.

You will probably need to use a mixture of closed and rated questions in designing your questionnaire. Open questions are useful but do take a lot longer to analyse and can not be rated in the same way as closed and rated questions.

Therefore, if you were going to investigate whether cheese is more important to males than females, your questionnaire should be designed to provide a score that makes this easy to see: the higher the participant’s overall score, the more important they believe cheese to be.