Activity . Telephone Survey Surveys are also conducted through telephone , and now-a-days you must have seen programmes asking you to send your views through mobile phones’ SMS. The telephone survey helps in reducing time. However, since the respondents do not know the interviewer, the technique is fraught with uncooperativeness, reluctance, and superficial answers by the respondents.
There is also a possibility that those responding may differ from those not responding, e.g., on age, gender, income levels, education levels, etc., besides their psychological characteristics. This will lead to very biased kinds of results. The method of observation have been discussed earlier. This method is also used which is used to assess an individual’s standing in relation to others on some mental or behavioural characteristics.
Two things are worth noting in this definition: objectivity and standardisation. Objectivity refers to the fact that if two or more researchers administer a psychological test on the same group of people, both of them would come up with more or less the same values for each person in the group. In order for a psychological test to become an objective measure, it is essential that items should be worded in such a manner that they communicate the same meaning to different readers. Also, the instructions to the test takers about how to answer the test items should be specified in advance.
The procedure of administering the test such as environmental conditions, time limit, mode of administration (individual or group) should be spelt, and the procedure for scoring of the participants’ responses need to be described. The construction of a test is a systematic process and involves certain steps. It involves detailed analysis of items, and estimating reliability , validity , and norms of the whole test. Reliability of the test refers to the consistency of scores obtained by an individual on the same test on two different occasions.
For example, you administer the test to a group of students today and re-administer it on the same set of students after some time, let us say days. If the test is reliable, there should