• Question: What's your favourite research method?

    Asked by Amy24 to Sam, Rose, Maggi, Kirsty, Ben on 13 Jun 2017. This question was also asked by Sarah.
    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 13 Jun 2017:

      Although I mostly do experiments, I really enjoy qualitative interview approaches because they enable you to explore the rich depth of people’s experiences.

      Recently I was at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference and some people there had gathered experiences from people and developed them into songs. It was a really interesting approach to exploring how people construct stories about their experiences (they psychologists worked with the interviewees to create something they all felt got the meaning across well). So the psychologists themselves were playing music and singing, or had made music videos to convey their research findings! It was a very new and interesting approach to explaining psychological phenomena!

    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      The one that helps me get the most accurate answers! 😉 Generally the method you use will depend on what you want to find out. For example, if you want to get in-depth explanations of why someone behaved in a certain way then you would probably do an interview. If you wanted to collect lots of attitude data, you would probably do questionnaires, or see how people respond to work pressure, you might do an observation study etc.
      Personally, I like using questionnaires because you can collect quantitative data (data you can turn into to numbers and analyse with a statistics programme), but also qualitative data (where you can ask detailed questions) so you can get quite a clear picture of what’s going on 🙂

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