Q.A school counsellor wants to find out why some Class XI students feel far more anxious before examinations than others. Suggest which method(s) of psychological enquiry would be appropriate for this problem, and justify your choice.

Since this question has two parts, one about measuring anxiety and one about explaining WHY it differs between students, more than one method is genuinely appropriate here. …

This problem actually has two related parts, first measuring how anxious different students are, and second understanding WHY some students are more anxious than others, so more than one method of enquiry is genuinely appropriate.

Psychological testing would be the natural starting point: administering a standardised anxiety test to the Class XI students would allow the counsellor to measure and compare each student's anxiety level in an objective, reliable and valid way, exactly the purpose psychological tests are designed for.

Once anxiety levels have been measured, correlational research could be used to investigate whether anxiety is related to other measurable variables, such as study habits, sleep duration, or parental or self-imposed academic expectations, helping the counsellor identify factors that tend to go along with higher anxiety, for prediction purposes, though not by itself proving that any one of these factors causes the anxiety.

For a genuinely deep, individual-level understanding of WHY a particular student feels far more anxious than others, a case study would be the most appropriate method, since it would allow the counsellor to combine interviews, observation and testing to build a rich, detailed picture of that student's specific circumstances, family situation, and personal history, in a way that a large-sample survey or correlational study could never achieve for one individual. …