Activity A
Questions, self reports and questionnaires.
There are many ways of conducting this activity. Any research which involves a self report measure is acceptable. Self report simply means any method which involves asking a participant about their feelings attitudes and so on. Examples of self reports are questionnaires, interviews and psychometric tests.
Probably the most common type of self report method used for this activity is a questionnaire on attitudes. An attitude is a liking or disliking for something.
Do not over complicate your questionnaire. It is usually best to identify two variables, (e.g. 1st or 2nd year student and attitudes to homework), and only ask enough questions to test these variables. This may be as small as two or three questions. (e.g. 'Are you a first year student or second year student?' and 'do you enjoy homework?'). However you may want to include distracter questions which you do not have to analyse. (e.g. 'Are you male or female?').
There is no need to do any sophisticated analysis for this activity.
Whichever type of self report measure you use you do need to be aware of other self report measures and issues which relate to this activity.
You need to know some of the strengths and weaknesses of different self report measures, such as questionnaires, interviews and psychometric tests. More on self report measures.
You need to know some of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of response scales, such as Likert scales, fixed choice questions and open ended questions and so on. More on rating scales.
You need to know some of the strengths and weaknesses of different sampling techniques such as opportunity sampling, random sampling. quota sampling and so on. More on sampling techniques.
You need to know about the ethical issues of using self report measures.
You need to know how the issues of reliability and validity relate to self report measures. More on reliability and validity.
More Stuff
More pages.- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Individual Differences
- Physiological Psychology
- Social Psychology
And A Bit More Stuff
Some more pages.
- About (just stuff about this site)
- PsychBlog (great blog dedicated to OCR psychology)
- Core Studies 2 (a quick link to stuff about this paper)
- Exam Questions (past exam questions of course)
- Shop (you know you want to buy something)
- Links (nearly as fab as books)
- Further reading (books are fab)
- A Level Psychology (that stuff you do in the 2nd year)
- LearnByIt (where you can buy stuff that I have written)
- Learn Psychology (great site for any students of psychology)