There are many questioning techniques. Psychologists use both interviews and questionnaires.
Questionnaires
- Often used to find out people’s opinions or behaviours.
- They can be highly structured enabling results to be easily analysed using descriptive statistics.
- Questionnaires can be less structured allowing the respondent to give further details
Advantages of Questionnaires
- Questionnaires can be highly structured enabling results to be easily analysed using descriptive statistics.
- Easy to analyse and quantify
- Easy to replicate
- Easy to administer
Disadvantages of Questionnaires
- Lacks flexibility
- People may give biased answers to create a socially desirable response.
Interviews
- This involves the researcher asking verbal questions to the participant.
- Interviews range from having no structure e.g just a topic area established to being very structured e.g a list of pre-prepared questions.
Advantages of Interviews
- Very Detailed
- Very Flexible allowing the researcher to explore interesting things that may arise
Disadvantages of Interviews
- Very Time Consuming
- Difficult to analyse and quantify
- Potential for participants to give incorrect responses.
