Preview
IB DP Psychology — Research Methodology | SL & HL | Paper 3
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define surveys, questionnaires, and interviews using IB-aligned research methodology terminology.
- Distinguish between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews and explain when each is appropriate.
- Explain the difference between open and closed questions and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each question type.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of self-report methods including issues of validity, reliability, and bias.
- Analyse self-report research using relevant concept areas: Bias, Causality, Measurement, and Responsibility.
- Apply knowledge of self-report methods to a given research scenario, justifying methodological choices.
- Discuss ethical considerations specific to the use of surveys and interviews in psychological research.
Introduction & Context
Imagine you want to understand how stressed university students feel during exam season. You could observe them in a library, but observation only tells you what people do — not what they think or feel. You could run a laboratory experiment, but stress is deeply personal and difficult to manipulate ethically. The most direct route to understanding someone's inner experience is simply to ask them. This is the fundamental logic behind self-report methods: if you want to know what a person thinks, believes, or has experienced, you ask them directly.
Self-report methods are among the most widely used tools in psychological research. They include surveys, questionnaires, and interviews — each of which gives researchers access to data that would be impossible to obtain through observation or experiment alone. Attitudes, opinions, memories, emotions, and beliefs are all internal states that only the participant can directly report. However, this reliance on participant honesty and self-awareness introduces a unique set of challenges that researchers must carefully manage.
Understanding when and how to use these methods — and what their limitations are — is central to Paper 3 of the IB Psychology examination. In Paper 3, you are given a stimulus piece of research and asked to evaluate its methodology. Self-report methods appear frequently in these stimuli, so a thorough understanding of their design, strengths, and weaknesses is essential.
🔍 Analogy — The Weather Reporter vs. the Thermometer A thermometer measures temperature objectively — it does not care how you feel about the cold. A weather reporter, on the other hand, describes what the weather feels like to people: "It feels bitterly cold today." Self-report methods are like the weather reporter. They capture subjective experience — how things feel to the participant — rather than objective, measurable facts. This makes them uniquely powerful for studying inner states, but also vulnerable to the reporter's own perceptions, moods, and desire to appear a certain way.
Core Concepts
Before we can evaluate these methods, we need to understand what each one actually is and how it differs from the others. The term "self-report" is an umbrella that covers several distinct tools. Each tool sits on a spectrum from highly standardised and controlled to open-ended and exploratory. Where a method sits on that spectrum determines what kind of data it produces and what its strengths and weaknesses are.
📖 Key Definition — Surveys and Questionnaires A questionnaire is a self-report data collection tool consisting of a fixed set of written questions that participants answer independently, without a researcher present. A survey is the broader process of collecting data from a sample of participants, often using a questionnaire as its instrument. In practice, the two terms are