ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces general principles concerning the asking of questions. So far, the authors have seen that psychologists can gather data by setting up experiments to see what people do under different conditions, or they can use observation techniques to record segments of behaviour in more or less natural circumstances. In general, any method that asks participants to report upon themselves is a self-report method, and these methods include questionnaires, many psychological assessment scales, interviews and also the use of verbal protocols are discussed. This issue of structured vs. unstructured (or ‘loose’) designs really takes us to the heart of the quantitative–qualitative debate again. A positivist view of interviews is that they are used to get facts from respondents and that, using various technical guards against sampling and procedural bias, interview data should provide a close match with an objective reality waiting to be discovered and described.
