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Notes -
I think self-reports could have value for determining answers to questions like "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you believe you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?" but those poll questions you quoted don't seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported at all. I don't think there's any good reason to believe that one's belief about how often one does these things has much correlation with how often one actually does these things, outside of the extremes, like literally never doing it or doing it constantly. I'd guess that they'd be more correlated with how high status the reporter believes these activities to be and how highly of themselves the reporters think. But that's just my pet conjecture, and in any case, I don't see a way to measure these potential correlations just from the self-reporting patterns without actually measuring the underlying activity.
It's the difference between what you're actually measuring vs. what you're trying to measure. Self-reports, with questions such as "how often do you ask questions in class?" only measure "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?". With any luck, belief in X actually correlates with X - but that's something that should be established at some point. My prior is that it correlates somewhat with X, but also correlates well with how highly one thinks of themselves, and for small differences between populations it becomes a meaningless measurement.
I really wish these papers would report it as "Philosophy students believe they are more inclined to consider alternative views" rather than just straight-up reporting their beliefs as truth.
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Survey questions like this are implicitly about belief, whether you spell it out or not. Of course the answers aren't always truthful, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think you can make the answers more reliable simply by inserting “do you believe”, and conversely, they aren't less reliable when that was only implied.
Try it yourself. Answer the following questions:
Or:
Or:
Or:
Seriously, answer these. Was there any question pair where the second answer differed from the first? And if not for you, why would you think that inserting “do you believe” changes anyone else's answer?
Well yeah, the fact that basically everyone would answer those questions with the same answer, despite the fact that those questions ask 2 fundamentally different things - the former being a question about objective reality and the latter being about subjective perception - was kind of the entire point I was making.
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