Definition: Judgments made by individuals about personal attributes.
Description. Self-reports constitute one of the most frequently employed methods in practice and research. Noting that self-reports have been employed in alcohol research since the beginning of the 20th century, Babor et al. (1987) observed that verbal reports remain “the procedure of choice for obtaining research data about patient characteristics and the effectiveness of alcoholism treatment” (p. 412). This remains true throughout much of psychological, educational, and social science research.
Despite the widespread use of self-report, test users often adopt one of the following beliefs: (a) because individuals can self-report, self-reports must be valid, or (b) because self-reports can be easily distorted, self-reports are useless. The first position represents that taken by most early measurement theorists. In contrast, self-report critics espousing the second position have pointed to studies comparing self-reports to what the critics see as a more objective criterion, that is, overt behavior. Researchers consistently find some discrepancies between self-reports of psychological phenomenon and behavior indicative of or expected to be related to the construct. In the area of stressful life events (SLEs), for example, researchers typically find consistent, but only small relations between SLEs and depression, suicide, and physical illnesses such as cardiovascular disease (Dohrenwend, 2006). For another perspective, watch this video.
Problems with self-reports may partially result from the mistaken assumption that items have the same meaning across individuals (cf. Schwarz, 1999). That is, when completing self-report measures, do respondents understand each item in the same way? Dohrenwend (2006) labelled this problem as intracategory variability. That is, respondents respond to each category on a self-report measure in terms of a wide range of personal experiences. In the category of serious illness, for example, respondents might reply affirmatively when the experiences ranged from simple flu to heart attacks. From a measurement perspective, a list of stressful life events represents experiences that could potentially occur with any person, but that are interpreted idiographically when individuals complete a SLE checklist. The basis on which individuals respond to categories on stress measures, consequently, can range “from the catastrophic to the trivial” (Dohrenwend, 2006, p. 479). Dohrenwend suggested that intracategory variability lowers reliability and validity estimates on SLE checklists.
