Research Tools (Used in psychology)

• Research tool can be defined as the instrument through which researchers can measure  which they indent in their study

List of basic research tools are as follow:

1)Standardized  questionnaires

• Structured questionnaire
• Unstructured questionnaire
• Self-administered mail surveys
• Group-administered questionnaire
• Online or web survey

2)interviews 

• Face-to-face interview
• Focus group
• Telephone interviews
• Structured interview 
• Unstructured interview

According to Coolican (1994) of different types of interview are following"

• Non-directive interviews
• Informal interviews
• Guided interviews
• Clinical interviews
• Fully structured interviews

3) Experiments

• Laboratory experiments
• Field experiments

4)Observation

5)Documentation

6) case research

7)Ethnography

8)Projective techniques  

Rorschach inkblot test

Thematic apperception test

Draw-A-Person test

Sentence completion test

Dilemmas

Research tools will be explained according to following methods of research

• Survey Research
• 2. Experimental Research
• 3. Case Research
• 4. Interpretive Research

Survey research

• Survey  research a research method involving the use of  or interviews to collect data about people and their preferences, thoughts, and behaviors in a systematic manner. Survey as a formal research method was pioneered in the 1930-40s by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to examine the effects of the radio on political opinion formation of the United States.  This method has since become a very popular method for quantitative research in the social sciences. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• The survey method can be used for descriptive, exploratory, or explanatory research (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Division of Survey Research

• Depending on how the data is collected, survey research can be divided into two broad categories: questionnaire surveys (which may be mail-in, group-administered, or online surveys), and interview surveys (which may be personal, telephone, or focus group interviews). (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Questionnaires are instruments that are completed in writing by respondents, while interviews are completed by the interviewer based on verbal responses provided by respondents. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

• Invented by Sir Francis Galton, a questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a set of questions (items) intended to capture responses from respondents in a standardized manner. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Questions may be unstructured or structured.  Unstructured questions ask respondents to provide a response in their own words, while structured questions ask respondents to select an answer from a given set of choices. Questions should be designed such that respondents are able to read, understand, and respond to them in a meaningful way, and hence the Questionnaire method may not be appropriate or practical for certain demographic groups such as children or the illiterate. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Structured questionnaire

• E.g.,
• Yes / No
• Strongly agree / Agree / Neutral / Disagree / Strongly disagree
• How often do you . . . ?
• 0               1                   2               3            4
• Never Seldom Sometimes Often Very often

Unstructured questionnaire

• Open ended questions
• How would you characterize Americans as a group? (Bordens and Abbott,2006)
• What do you think?
• What is your opinion ?
• Partially open ended Item
• Who introduced you to psychologist?
• Family
• Classmate
• Neighbor
• Other(Specify)  …………

(Bordens and Abbott,2006)

Self-administered mail surveys

• Most questionnaire surveys tend to be  self-administered mail surveys, where the same questionnaire is mailed to a large number of people, and willing respondents can complete the survey at their convenience and return it in postage-prepaid envelopes. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Mail surveys are advantageous in that they are unobtrusive, and they are inexpensive to administer, since bulk postage is cheap in most countries. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• However, response rates from mail surveys tend to be quite low since most people tend to ignore survey requests.  There may also be long delays (several months) in respondents’ completing and returning the survey (or they may simply lose it).  (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Hence, the researcher must continuously monitor responses as they are being returned and send reminders to non-respondents repeated reminders (two or three reminders at intervals of one to 1.5 months is ideal). (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Questionnaire surveys are also not well suited for issues that require clarification on the part of the respondent (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Group-administered questionnaire

• A second type of survey is  group-administered questionnaire. sample of respondents is brought together at a common place and time, and each respondent is asked to complete the survey questionnaire while in that room.  Respondents enter their responses independently without interacting with each other.  This format is convenient for the researcher, and high response rate is assured.  If respondents do not understand any specific question, they can ask for clarification.  In many organizations, it is relatively easy to assemble a group of employees in a conference room or lunch room, especially if the survey is approved by corporate executives. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Online or web survey

• A more recent type of questionnaire survey is an online or web survey.  These surveys are administered over the Internet using interactive forms.  Respondents may receive an electronic mail request for participation in the survey with a link to an online website where the survey may be completed.  Alternatively, the survey may be embedded into an e-mail. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Interview Survey

• Interviews are a more personalized form of data collection method than questionnaires, and are conducted by trained interviewers using the same research protocol as questionnaire surveys (i.e., a standardized set of questions). (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• In addition, unlike mail surveys, the interviewer has the opportunity to clarify any issues raised by the respondent or ask probing (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Interviews are time-consuming
•   Special interviewing skills are needed on part of the interviewer.  The interviewer is also considered to be part of the measurement instrument (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Face-to-face interview

• The most typical form of interview is  personal or face-to-face interview, where the interviewer works directly with the respondent to ask questions and record their responses. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Personal interviews may be conducted at the respondent’s home or office location. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Focus group

• A variation of the personal interview is a group interview, also called focus group.  In this technique, a small group of respondents (usually 6-10 respondents) are interviewed together in a common location.  The interviewer is essentially a facilitator whose job is to lead the discussion, and ensure that every person has an opportunity  to respond.  Focus groups allow deeper examination of complex issues than other forms of survey research, because when people hear others talk, it often triggers responses or ideas that they did not think about before
• Focus group discussion may be dominated by a dominant personality, and some individuals may be reluctant to voice their opinions in front of their peers or superiors, especially while dealing with a sensitive issue such as employee underperformance or office politics.  Because of their small sample size, focus groups are usually used for exploratory research rather than descriptive or explanatory research. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Telephone interviews

A third type of interview survey is  telephone interviews.  In this technique, interviewers contact potential respondents over the phone, typically based on a random selection of people from a telephone directory, to ask a standard set of survey questions.

• A more recent and technologically advanced approach is computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), increasing being used by academic, government, and commercial survey researchers,
• where the interviewer is a telephone operator, who is guided through the interview process by a computer program displaying instructions and questions to be asked on a computer screen. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Structured interview 

• A structured  interview  (also known as a standardized interview or a researcher-administered survey) is a quantitative research method commonly employed in survey research  . The aim of this approach is to ensure that each interviewee is presented with exactly the same questions and this ensures that answers can be reliably aggregated.(Psychology Wiki)

Unstructured interview

• Open ended questions

As Coolican (1994) pointed out, there are various kinds of interview which vary enormously in terms of the amount of structure they contain. In what follows, we will make
use of his categorization of different types of interview.

• Non-directive interviews
• Informal interviews
• Guided interviews
• Clinical interviews
• Fully structured interviews

Non-directive interviews

• Non-directive  interviews  possess the  least structure, with the  person  being  interviewed(the interviewee) being free to discuss almost anything he or she wants. The role of the interviewer  in  non-directive  interviews  is  to  guide  the  discussion  and  to  encourage the interviewee  to  be  more  forthcoming.  This  type  of  interview  is  used  very  often  in psychotherapy, but has little relevance to research. (Coolican ,1994)

Informal interviews
Informal interviews Informal  interviews  resemble  non-directive  interviews,  in  that  the  interviewer  listens patiently  and focuses mainly  on  encouraging the  interviewee to  discuss  issues  in more depth or detail. However, informal interviews differ in that there are certain general topics that the interviewer wishes to explore. One of the best-known examples involving informal interviews was a large-scale study of workers at the Hawthorne works of Western Electric. The aim of this study was to explore industrial relations via a series of interviews. What  emerged  from  informal  interviews  was  that  the  relatively  minor  issues  initially raised by the workers generally reflected deeper and more serious worries. (Coolican ,1994)

Guided interviews
Informal but guided interviews possess a little more structure than informal interviews. The interviewer identifies beforehand the issues to be addressed, but how and when to raise those issues is decided during the course of the interview. Structured but open-ended interviews use a formal procedure in which all interviewees are asked precisely the same questions in the same order. Such a procedure prevents the interviewee from side-tracking the interview and taking control of it away from the interviewer. The interviews are open-ended, in the sense that the questions that are asked allow plenty of scope for various
kinds of answers (e.g. “How do you see your career developing?”).

Questionnaires and interviews

• Questionnaires and interviews are often used together in mixed method studies investigating educational assessment (e.g., Brookhart & Durkin, 2003; Lai & Waltman, 2008).
• While questionnaires can provide  evidence of patterns amongst large populations, qualitative interview data often gather more in-depth insights on participant attitudes, thoughts, and actions (Kendall, 2008).

Strengths of Survey Research
First, surveys are an excellent vehicle for measuring a wide variety of unobservable data, such as people’s preferences (e.g., political orientation), traits (e.g., self-esteem), attitudes (e.g., toward immigrants), beliefs (e.g., about a new law), behaviors  (e.g., smoking or drinking behavior), or factual information (e.g., income). (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Second, survey research is also ideally suited for remotely collecting data about a population that is too large to observe directly.  A large area, such as an entire country, can be covered using mail-in, electronic mail, or telephone surveys using meticulous sampling to ensure that the population is adequately represented in a small sample. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Third, large sample surveys may allow detection of small effects even while analyzing multiple variables, and depending on the survey design, may also allowcomparative analysis of population subgroups. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Biases in Survey Research

• Non-response bias. 
• Sampling bias.
• Social desirability bias

Experimental Research

• Experimental research, often considered to be the “gold standard” in research designs, is one of the most rigorous of all research designs (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• The unique strength of experimental research is its internal validity (causality) due to its ability to link cause and effect through treatment manipulation, while controlling for the spurious effect of extraneous variable. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Experimental research is best suited for explanatory research (rather than for descriptive or exploratory research)(Bhattacherjee,2012)
• where the goal of the study is to examine cause-effect relationships (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Types of Experiments

• Laboratory experiments
• Field experiments

Laboratory experiments
Laboratory experiments, conducted in laboratory (artificial) settings, tend to be high in internal validity, but this comes at the cost of low external validity (generalizability), because the artificial (laboratory) setting in which the study is conducted may not reflect the real world (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Field experiments
Field experiments, conducted in field  settings such as in a real organization, and high in  external validity.  But such experiments are relatively rare, because of the  difficulties associated with manipulating treatments and controlling for extraneous effects in a field setting. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Interpretive Research
Interpretive research is a research paradigm that is  based on the assumption that social  reality is not singular or objective) (Bhattacherjee,2012)
Techniques  of  Interpretive Research

• Observation
• Documentation
• Case research
• Ethnography

(Bhattacherjee,2012)

Observation

• Observational techniques include  direct observation, where the researcher is a neutral and passive external observer and is not involved in the phenomenon of interest (as in case research), and  participant observation, where the researcher is an active in the phenomenon and  her inputs  or mere presence influence the phenomenon being studied (as in action research). (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Documentation

• Documentation, where external and internal documents, such as,  electronic mails, annual reports, financial statements, newspaper articles, websites, may be used  to cast further insight into the phenomenon of interest or to corroborate other forms of evidence. (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Case study

• Case studies are in-depth investigations of a single person, group, event or community.(Mcleod,2008)
• Typically data are gathered from a variety of sources and by using several different methods
• Observations
• Interviews (semi-structured interviews)
• Patient’s personal history .(Mcleod,2008)

Ethnography

• The ethnographic research method, derived largely from the field of anthropology.
• The researcher must be deeply immersed in  the social  culture over an extended period of time (usually  8 months to 2 years) and should engage, observe, and record the daily life of the studied culture  and its  social  participants within their  natural setting. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• The  primary mode of data collection is  participant observation, and  data analysis involves  a “sense-making” approach. (Bhattacherjee,2012)
• Covert – the ethnographer does not reveal their ‘true’ identity
• Overt – the participants are aware of the researcher’s motives and they grant their consent for the data to be used (Bhattacherjee,2012)

Projective techniques  

• Rorschach inkblot test
• Thematic apperception test
• Draw-A-Person test
• Sentence completion test
• Dilemmas

References

• Bhattacherjee,2000.Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, andPractices. Florida,USA
• Research methods: Psychological enquiry ,Retrieved from http://www.grajfoner.com/Research%20methods%20paper%20mbff.pdf, 2012