Self-report techniques: questionnaires; interviews, structured and unstructured. The design of questionnaires, including the use of open and closed questions.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe self-report techniques (questionnaires and interviews) and how questionnaires are designed, including open and closed questions. The exam skill is to match question and interview types to the kind of data they produce and to apply good questionnaire-design principles.

Questionnaires and interviews

Self-report techniques gather data by asking participants directly about their own thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviour. Questionnaires use a set of written questions and have practical advantages: they can be distributed to large numbers of people cheaply, can be completed without the researcher present, and produce data that are straightforward to analyse, especially if the questions are closed. Their weaknesses are that response rates can be low, that only literate and willing people respond, and that answers may be distorted by social desirability bias. Interviews collect self-report data through spoken questions and sit on a spectrum of structure. A structured interview asks pre-set, standardised questions in a fixed order, so it is easy to replicate and to compare across participants, and needs less interviewer skill, but it cannot probe interesting answers. An unstructured interview has no fixed schedule and develops like a conversation, so it gathers rich, detailed qualitative data and can follow up unexpected responses, but it is hard to replicate and analyse, depends on a skilled interviewer, and is more open to interviewer bias. A semi-structured interview combines a core set of fixed questions with the freedom to follow up, giving a balance of the two.

Open and closed questions

The choice between open and closed questions shapes the kind of data collected. Closed questions give the respondent a fixed set of options, such as a yes/no choice or a Likert scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree", and so produce quantitative data that are quick to analyse statistically and easy to compare between participants, at the cost of depth and the risk that the fixed options do not capture what the respondent really thinks. Open questions invite respondents to answer in their own words, producing rich qualitative data with more detail and insight, but these data are harder and slower to analyse and to compare. Effective questionnaire design follows clear principles: avoid leading questions that suggest a particular answer, avoid technical jargon or ambiguous wording, avoid double-barrelled questions that ask two things at once, and avoid emotive language, so that the questions measure what they intend to and the data are valid.