In this video I explain case studies and the survey method, providing explanations of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, such as applicability, issues with framing, and reporting bias.

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Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review and in this video I’d like to talk about case studies and the survey method, so we’ll begin with case studies.

So what is a case study? Well a case study is a detailed analysis of a single individual or a small group of people or a particular situation and by having such a narrow focus we’re able to get a lot of detailed knowledge about this particular subject.

So we can say a case study involves in-depth analysis. And this narrow focus also means that we can use multiple operational definitions to study the property that we’re interested in. So for example, if I was interested in intelligence I might do a case study on somebody with exceptionally high IQ. In doing this, I could give them a number of intelligence assessments so I’d have multiple operational definitions and I could see how they perform on all of these different tasks and that would give me a more complete picture of their intelligence.

That’s one way that we use case studies, when we have exceptional ability or sort of unique circumstances. We also use it in cases where it’s something that we couldn’t otherwise study, something that we couldn’t induce experimentally, so for instance, if someone was in an accident and had a particular type of brain damage then we’d probably want to do a case study on this person, because we can’t do an experiment we can’t take a hundred people and give 50 of this brain damage and see what happens. But if somebody already has the brain damage to a particular area we can study the effects of this brain damage in great detail.

Now because we’re focusing on one individual or a small group of people, the results that we get my not apply to everyone else. So the downside of a case study is while we get a lot of detailed knowledge that knowledge might not be applicable to understanding the average person. So we might not be able to apply that knowledge to other people. If I study someone with a particular brain injury the knowledge I get might not apply to the average person’s life.

So what we do when we want to find out about the average. Well in that case we might turn to the survey method. And the survey method allows us to access lots of people so we get data from more people but because it’s so broad, we’re getting less detail from each person. So I collect surveys or questionnaires from as many people as I can, this will give me a good view of the average, but the amount of detail what I’m getting about each individual in that study is going to be fairly small.

We have to be careful when we use the survey method, there’s a few things that we need to be aware of and one of these things is that because we’re getting such a small amount of detail, small changes in our questions might influence the results. So the framing of the questions is important because we might only have that one question to get information from the person.
And the way that we word that question might influence their answer. So for instance if I were doing a study on people’s attitudes about censorship. I might have a question asking people if it’s OK for schools to censor the Internet and if I use that word censor many people might not like it, and they might immediately be against it.

They might say “no, this is not OK, I don’t like censorship” however I could re-word that question and ask whether schools should filter inappropriate content like pornography. In this case, people might suddenly decide they agree with this. They might not think of it as censorship they might think of it as “filtering”.

So how we word questions on a form can be important, it can influence people’s results and I want to be aware of that when I plan my survey or my questionnaire. Another problem with the survey method is what’s known as reporting bias.

So what reporting bias is, it’s that the people that report, the people that get back to me with survey results, there might be something different about them. And that might be influencing my results. So for instance if I conducted a survey on happiness, I gave thousands of people a survey on happiness. Well what might happen is when people see this is a questionnaire about happiness, is that only happy people take the time to fill it out and send it back to me. And people who are depressed might see this survey and not bother.

What’s going to happen then is I’m going to collect all my data
and when I look at it, I’m only getting the scores from happy people. So I’m going to think that on average people are happier
than they actually are. That’s because I’m not counting all the depressed people because they’re not bothering to report back to me. So that’s reporting bias and we need to be aware that this is another problem with the survey method.

So that’s case studies and the survey method in the next video will talk about populations and this gets to this question of how do we choose who’s in our study, who do we want to know about?

I hope you found this helpful, if so please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!