Describe self report
Method or ways o obtain data by asking participants to provide information about themselves
What is an open question ?
Questions that allow participants to give a full detailed response in their own words
What are the advantages of open questions ?
- provide qualitative data, provide detail, so participants can express opinions fully raising validity
- analysis retains detail of participants answers so information isn’t test through averaging
What are the disadvantages of open questions ?
- produce qualitative data which is time consuming to analyse
- interpretation of qualative data can be subjective leading to bias reducing inter rater reliability
- findings are individual so are less generalisable
Describe closed questions
A question that offer a small number of explicitly stated alternative responses and no opportunity to expand
Give the advantages of closed questions
- easy to respond to so large amount of data can be collected quickly
- more reliable as larger amounts of data can be collected
- produce quantitative data which is easy to analyse
What are the disadvantages of closed questions
- only produce quantitative data which lacks detail, lowering validity
- the participants data is nominal so can only be used to calculate mean
Give the definition of a questionnaire
A self report method that uses pre written questions
Give the advantages of a questionnaire
- relatively easy to administer and can be sent by post or email make it time and cost effective
- quantitative data is easy to analyse
- more truthful than interview if answers or personal or socially sensitive
- easily repeated
What are the disadvantages of questionnaires w
- Response bias can lead to invalid results
- limited because no flexibility for collection of unexpected data
- leading questions so not representative
Describe an interview
A self report method in which participants reply verbally to questions asked
What is a structured interview ?
Predominantly closed questions in a fixed order. The questions are likely to be scripted so are standardised and consistently might be even be required for the interviewers posture etc
What is a semi structured interview ?
Uses a fixed list of open and closed questions although the interviewer can introduce additional questions if required
What is an unstructured interview?
And generally begins with a standard question for all participants but from thereon, questions depend on the respondents answers. There might be a list of topics for the interview to cover
What are the strengths of interviews?
– Structured interview data is easy to analyse as it is quantitive data
– semistructured and unstructured interviews enable researcher to gain specific and detailed information that could be missed in structured
– face-to-face a researcher can respond effectively
– easily repeatedTo generate more data our check findings
– rapidly assessed for reliability and improved by removing inconsistent results
What are the weaknesses of interviews?
– Structured interviews are limited by fixed questions
– investigate Bias, can alter the way they ask the questions
– participants can be affected by baises such as social desirability and influenced by leading questions
– only some people are willing to cooperate so it may be unrepresentative
