Language
Country/Area
No result found
The magical journey of questionnaire survey: How to understand the inner world through questions?
In today's psychological research, questionnaires and self-report methods serve as important bridges, allowing researchers to gain a deeper understanding of people's inner lives. A self-report study is a survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the questions and select answers on their own, without outside interference. Such methods are often used in observational studies and experiments to obtain participants' reactions and feelings.
Self-reporting is a method of gathering feedback by asking participants about their feelings, attitudes, beliefs, etc.
A questionnaire is a self-report method that usually consists of a structured set of written questions that may include open and closed questions. Open questions allow participants to answer in their own words, while closed questions provide limited choices that are easy to quantify and analyze. While quantitative data is easy to work with, open questions can provide deeper insights.
In addition, the interview is also a self-report method and is conducted through a verbal questionnaire. Interviews can be structured, with pre-set questions, or unstructured, with no pre-set questions at all. The main advantage of the self-report method is that it allows participants to describe their own experiences rather than infer the respondent's responses based solely on observations.
Questionnaires and interviews make it relatively easy and fast to study large samples and examine multiple variables to get a sense of how people behave and feel in real-life situations.
However, these methods also have their limitations. For example, social desirability bias causes participants to respond in a way that reflects themselves. Additionally, respondents may have misunderstood the questions, which could affect the validity of the data. In addition, if the questionnaire is sent via email or a panel of teachers, the response rate may be extremely low, affecting the representativeness of the study.
In questionnaires, the combination of closed questions and open questions can overcome the shortcomings of both. Closed-ended questions facilitate quantification but do not provide room for in-depth exploration; open-ended questions can reveal more deep-seated emotions but are more difficult to analyze. Another common problem is rating scales, such as Likert scales, in which participants are asked to express their degree of agreement or disagreement with a specific statement. This approach makes the data more specific and easier to analyze, but it also faces respondent preference choices. The question of the middle option.
In self-reporting, reliability and validity are two key issues, which directly affect the credibility and validity of the research.
Reliability refers to the consistency of a measurement tool, assessing whether a measurement can produce similar results under similar circumstances. The reliability of self-report scales can be assessed through split-half testing. Validity, on the other hand, is whether a measurement tool actually measures what it claims to do, which usually needs to be assessed by comparison with other self-reports on the same subject.
However, self-report methods also have a number of shortcomings. Any study based on self-reports runs the risk of exaggerated or excessive social desirability of participants' answers. They may be too ashamed to disclose intimate details or provide biased answers because they were inspired by the research hypothesis. For studies involving voluntary participation, a lack of respondents may also lead to bias, even if not all respondents participate, which will affect the representativeness of the study results.
In the process of self-reporting, researchers need to pay more attention to the design of questionnaire questions, avoid leading questions, and allow participants to express freely through open questions and answers. They also need to strengthen confidentiality measures to allow respondents to provide more information. Authentic response.
Despite its inherent limitations, self-report research remains an important tool for understanding the human psyche.
Whatever their limitations, self-report methods are indispensable in psychological research, and their results can provide important insights into human behavior and psychology. In this way, we can uncover a fuller sense of self and social interaction. How much do you think the tug-of-war between honesty and social expectations in this kind of investigation affects the final outcome?
