Final answer:
Joe's embarrassment when asked about his use of Viagra illustrates the problem with sensitive questions in interviews or surveys. Researchers often opt for anonymous written surveys for such issues to ensure more honest responses, contributing to qualitative research.
Step-by-step explanation:
The scenario described involves a problem with sensitive questions. When researchers or interviewers ask questions that delve into private or personal topics, respondents might feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, as happened with Joe when asked about his use of Viagra.
To collect data on such sensitive issues, researchers often use anonymous surveys or written questionnaires to ensure confidentiality, allowing participants to share more honest responses. This type of information gathering is part of qualitative research, which aims to understand people's beliefs, attitudes, and feelings, producing qualitative data that can be rich but also harder to organize and analyze than quantitative data. In the context of surveys, open-ended questions provide the opportunity for in-depth responses, while closed questions facilitate easier comparison of answers and typically result in quantitative data.