PSYC 2001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Double Negative, Bennington College, Social Desirability Bias

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2001
• Professor: Angel Mackenzie

Document Summary

Provides a methodology to asking people to tell about themselves. Way to study relationships among variables and ways that attitudes and behaviours change over time. Provides useful information for making public policy decisions. Collect a large amount of information that would otherwise be impractical to. National survey of student engagement (nsse) students provide information on university-related variables. For example: campus support, interaction with faculty and academic quality. By doing this they can get a lot of information on various students on their institution. Assumption of using survey research is that people respond truthfully. Response sets: responding from a particular perspective rather than directly/truthfully answering questions. You apply a filter to your answers and makes them less true. Variables you may want to measure: attitudes and beliefs, facts and demographics, behaviours. Potential problems that stem from difficulty understanding the question: vague or imprecise terms; ungrammatical sentence structure; phrasing that overloads working memory; embedding the question with misleading information.