Questionnaires can be used in nonexperimental and experimental research

Questionnaires can be used in nonexperimental and experimental research. Questionnaires are often discussed in the context of nonexperimental research, where the goal is to describe some characteristic of the people who are surveyed. And we will discuss questionnaire construction in this chapter because questionnaires are often used in surveys. However, we want to make it clear that they can also be used to mea¬ sure the effects of a manipulated independent variable in an experiment. For example, we might be interested in how attitudes toward smoking are influenced by watching a television commercial featuring an emotionally charged testimonial by a cancer patient. We can randomly assign participants to watch either the cancer commercial or an equally emotional commercial about famine victims. Following our treatment con¬ ditions, we could give all participants a questionnaire to assess their attitudes on smok¬ ing. In this case, we are using a questionnaire in an experiment.