Self reports involve participants recording their own thoughts and feelings (often can involve questionnaires of open and closed responses to researchers questions)
Strengths
- Allow researchers to access a person's reasons for behaviour as well as unobservable psychological aspects (dreams, beliefs, attitudes, experiences etc)
- Large amounts of data > increase representativeness and generalisable results
- Easy to replicate (specially questionnaire)
- Closed questions > easy to score/analyse
- Open questions > rich qualitative data
Weaknesses
- People may lie > say what they think researchers want to hear (demand char & social desirability)
- Questions/scales may be interpreted differently by different people
- Closed questions > choosing answers they do not reflect their true opinions > lower validity
- Open questions > difficult to score and time consuming
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