Do any of ye know of studies that use dual or comparative questionnaires?

MonkeyBalls

Any of ye knowledgeable about statistics or research methods?

Doing a little research on this.

Instead of explaining it I'll give an example. If this sounds like anything you may have heard before, please let me know, because I can find nothing so far on the interwebs.

You give a questionnaire to one person, let's say: John.

Then you give the a similar questionnaire to another person who knows John, let's say his friend Sarah.

John's questionnaire will ask him certain questions about his life, e.g. "I am an extroverted person who enjoys travelling" or "I am a cheerful and optimistic person" (e.g "strong agree"/"agree"/"undecided"/"disagree", etc, on a scale.)

Sarah's questionnaire will ask her about John, to see how she evaluates John in terms of extroversion, optimism, etc.

Then the two results are compared. You might find that John tends to have an inflated opinion of himself compared to Sarah's evaluation of him, or maybe not.

I know about cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, but not of studies like the one described above. Do any of you?

JuliusCaesar

Sounds like those 360 degree things that occupational/work psychologists use. I've not ever used anything like that myself.

hotspur

I've used such a methodology in the past. As far as I am aware it just comes under the heading of mulitmethod and is self-report peer-report. I think JC is referring to multilevel measurement. Combined multilevel multimethod and multitrait multimethod methods exist such as Campbell and Fiske's multitrait-multimethod matrix.

I'm not sure why you are interested in it, but if it is in the context of doing research then you may wish to check out the book Handbook of Multimethod Measurment in Psychology. It's co-edited by Ed Diener who is cool because he's a positive psychology guy.

MonkeyBalls

Thank you Hotspur. I've sent you a PM.

And thanks JC as well.