Self Report Data

Self-report data can take many forms; more traditionally this has included interviews and focus groups (which are covered in Chapter 10), questionnaires (which are covered in Chapter 14) and diaries. More recently self-report data has taken the form of blogs, social media, photographs, images, video and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Indeed, the nature of what we think about as self-report data has changed and proliferated in recent years. Furthermore, as technological innovation increases and becomes more widely accessible, self-report data is more commonly being produced online. Anyone with access to a phone or a laptop and the Internet can collect and share self-report data. Documents, photographs, videos and images can be uploaded, emailed and widely shared. For example, Brown and colleagues (2016) note that social networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) facilitate the integration of both text and image sharing in the same message. Images can be posted as a profile picture or as a stand-alone message, or in combination with text and/or video.

In our own research we have looked at a variety of questions that have called for the collection of many different types of self-report data. Our research has focused on self-report via images, text, video and sometimes a combination of different forms of self-report data (e.g. Clancy, Povey, & Rodham, 2018; Gavin, Rees-Evans & Brosnan, 2019; Gavin, Rees-Evans, Duckett, & Brosnan, 2019; Navarro, Wainwright, Rodham, & Jordan, 2018; Ryan-Vig, Gavin, & Rodham, 2019) and much of our work has involved more traditional methods of gathering self-report data: face-to-face interviews, diaries and focus groups. In this chapter, we draw from our own work and that of others in order to introduce self-report data to you. We hope you will embrace the complexity of this topic and become excited about the possibilities it brings for contributing to research in psychology.