Ensuring that variables are in a form that can be easily tested.
What are controls?
What you do to eliminate extraneous variables - standardising.
What are examples of controls in research?
Times
Environment
Instructions.
What is empirical?
Based on concerned with or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory.
What are demand characteristics?
Where participants pick up clues and work out the hypothesis of a study and behave accordingly.
What overcomes demand characteristics?
Single blind - participants will be unaware of what condition they are in.
What are investigator effects?
Any (unintentional) influence of the researcher's behaviour/characteristics on participants/data/outcome.
What overcomes investigator effects?
Double blind - where participants are not told the true purpose of the research and the experimenter is also blind to at least some aspects of the research.
What are demand characteristics?
There is a high risk that participants will change their natural behaviour in line with their interpretation of the aims of a study, which affects how they respond in any tasks they are set.
What is standardisation?
Refers to the process in which procedures used in research are kept the
same. Attention is taken to keep all elements of a procedure identical, so that methods are sensitive to any change in performance.
What is social desirability bias?
This bias in participants’ behaviour occurs when they note aspects of the study that are to do with particular social norms or expectations, and then present themselves in what they deem a socially acceptable fashion.
