E Reporting studies that include questionnaires

The psychological experiment is a versatile technique. At home in the laboratory, where it is possible to exert very high levels of control over extraneous variation and capture the full attention of your participant, it is nevertheless possible also to run interesting and informative experiments with a pen and a brief questionnaire, stopping people in the street, or taking 5 minutes of their time in classrooms; then there are the remarkable field experiments, in which researchers with time, energy, and the resources and imagination have created entire situations that look real but are in fact vehicles for their experiments. This versatility is great for us as psychological scientists. However, it can pose problems when it comes to knowing how to write up an experiment, particularly one that is largely based on written materials, such as a questionnaire.

This part of the website is designed to help you with writing up experiments and other studies involving questionnaires.

To summarize what you can find about this issue on this website:

1 In some cases, such as where you have a large number of DVs to report, you may need to modify the DESIGN to keep it to the required length.

2 Where you have spent time and effort in developing your questionnaire, then you might consider including a separate subsection to the METHOD describing the process of questionnaire development.

3 In developing a new measure you will need to address questions about its validity and reliability.

4 In studies, including experiments, involving questionnaires the MATERIALS may well become quite lengthy. However, as always in report writing, you should strive to keep the section as concise as you can.

5 On the other hand, in questionnaire-based studies the PROCEDURE may well be quite brief, as there may be comparatively little face-to-face interaction with the participant to report.

6 Questionnaires run on computers can require you to strike a balance between what is reported in the MATERIALS and what is reported in the PROCEDURE. However, as ever, the key thing is to make clear somewhere in these sections what was in the questionnaire and when particular sections of it were presented to the participant.

7 RESULTS of questionnaire-based studies can be quite lengthy. Particular issues that you may have to cover include the processing of data prior to analysis, reporting response rates and missing data, and dealing with multiple sets of DVs and analyses.

8 The RESULTS will be shorter when the questionnaire contains filler items or when you combine responses to individual questions into composite scores for analysis.

9 If you have used published scales it is useful to relate the scores of your participants to the scale’s norms (if these are available) to establish whether your sample deviates from these norms or has scored in the expected range.

For more on each of these points, see the appropriate section of this website.