Self-report techniques. Questionnaires; interviews, structured and…

The idea

Self-report asks people about themselves, accessing thoughts and feelings. A questionnaire is written and fixed, so hundreds can be distributed cheaply with identical wording. Closed items, like a five-point Likert scale, produce quantitative data that can be summarised and tested, while open items produce richer material that is slow to analyse. Spoken methods differ in what is decided in advance: a structured interview is a questionnaire read aloud, replicable but with no room to follow up, while an unstructured interview starts from a topic and follows the respondent, gaining depth but losing standardisation. Social desirability bias is the standing weakness, and leading or double-barrelled items make it worse.

What earns the marks

• Self-report defined as the participant supplying the data about their own thoughts, feelings or behaviour, reaching what cannot be observed.
• Questionnaire: a fixed set of written items, delivered without a researcher present, so large samples are cheap and wording is identical for everyone.
• Closed questions give quantitative data that is quick to analyse and compare but restricts the answer; open questions give qualitative depth that is harder to summarise.
• Structured interview: pre-set questions asked in a fixed order, so it is replicable, comparable across respondents and needs little training.
• Unstructured interview: a topic rather than a schedule, with follow-up questions, producing rich qualitative data but low standardisation and difficult analysis.
• Design points that earn marks: no leading, double-barrelled, emotive or jargon-laden items, a sensible mix of closed and open, filler items to disguise the aim, and a pilot study.
• Evaluation: social desirability bias, acquiescence and response set, interviewer effects in spoken methods, and low response rates for postal questionnaires.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Writing that questionnaires are "unreliable" when the point being reached for is social desirability bias or acquiescence, which are validity problems.

• Calling any spoken method unstructured.

  Put it right: A fixed list of questions read out is a structured interview however informal it sounds.

• Producing example items that are themselves leading or double-barrelled, such as asking about stress and sleep in one question.

• Assuming all questionnaire data is quantitative, then choosing a statistical test for answers that are open-ended prose.

Exam tips

• Asked to write two questions, give one closed item with its response options printed out and one open item, both clearly about the stem’s topic.
• Justify each design choice against the aim in the stem rather than in general, for instance why depth matters more than comparability here.
• Explain a limitation in context: say what a participant in this particular study would be tempted to under-report or exaggerate.
• If asked to improve an item, rewrite it in full rather than describing the improvement.