Ethics
What is ethics?
Correct rules of conduct necessary when carrying out research. It protects research participants from physical and psychological harms.
What is validity?
Whether the research does what it claims to do.
A researcher randomly selects five people from the school and sees how their productiveness is affected by music. What kind of sampling method was used?
random sampling
What is procedure and why is it important to clarify it?
a step by step process used by the researcher to carry out the study
it allows for replication of the study
What is observation?
Observation is one method for collecting research data. It involves watching a participant and recording relevant behavior for later analysis.
Why is anonymity important?
Protection of participant’s privacy.
The results of the study may be embarrassing, or could be used against the participant.
What is internal validity?
The extent to which the results of the study can be generalized to other situations and to other people.
State an example of a sampling method and explain how it is done.
Ex. Stratified Sampling; Participants from within various subgroups of the population are randomly selected.
What is the difference between a retrospective and prospective study?
Retrospective (asking participant about past behaviour)
Prospective (Measure variable at beginning of study and observe the effect of the variable over time.)
What is qualitative research?
Research that produces descriptive data that is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations for an individual/group’s behavior.
What is done in a debriefing? Why is it done?
After the research, the researcher explains the true aims and purposes of the study and clarifies any deception caused during the research.
It is done so that the participants leave the study in the same physical and psychological state in which they arrived, and have no stress or confusion about the research.
Why is validity important?
It is important for the study to have high validity for the results to be accurately applied to real life and interpreted and generalized so the findings are actually credible and useful.
Explain how a student doing interviews for their study may use haphazard sampling to get people to participate in a study.
Ex. Standing in front of the cafeteria door during lunch and choosing students to interview.
Comapre and contrast doing a field study and having a laboratory setting.
Field studies allow the research to be done in much natural and realisitc settings than in a laboratody setting. However, laboratory settings allow more control over the situation, and there are less external factors affecting the subjects.
What are the three types of interviews? Explain what they are.
Structured interview
Interview schedules states exactly what questions should be asked, order of questions
Unstructured interview
Schedules only specify topic and available time
Semi-structured interview
Informal conversation but interview follows a schedule.
Give 3 examples of bad ethics.
Ex.
- deceiving the participant about the purpose/aims of the study.
- abusing participants physically/ emotionally
- not allowing the participant to withdraw from the experiment
A scientist is doing research on how they type of music being played affects a person's social behavior. How might a researcher conduct his/her research to raise external validity?
Ex.
Have a big sample size that takes people from different population subgroups to increase population validity.
Observe activities of people at a party while switching the type of music. (study conducted in real life situation→ecological validity)
How can self-selected sampling be biased?
The population only consists of those with outgoing personalities, willing to participate in research by themselves. Those who willingly participate will also NOT represent the entire population well.
Why might a researcher choose a prospective study over a retrospective study?
State an area of uncertainty that can be discussed in the Rosenthal and Jacobsen study?
Ex. Why the difference of growth between the control and experimental group was not significant in older students.
Whether the education system affects how students react to expectations.
Analyze the ethics of the Rosenthal and Jacobson study.
Consent - children can't give consent
Undue Stress or Harm - Teacher's expectations created as part of the research can cause bad performance in school and affecting their academics in the long run
Deception- the scientists need to tell the teachers and students about the aim of the study after the research is finished or else it will be deception
Assess the external validity of the Rosenthal and Jacobsen study using population validity and ecologival validity.
External validity high (in a real-life situation not in lab and has high mundane realism as taking tests and learning at school is realistic way to measure how expectation affects growth)
Population validity somewhat low (other nationalities, other age groups, and educational systems are not taken into consideration, as they only use one school)
Is there any sampling bias in the Rosenthal and Jacobsen study? If so explain how there is bias.
Yes
- used only one school (elementary school)
- although used everyone at the school, biased by the collective mindset on studying of the students and education system of school.
A researcher wants to study how age affects a person's concentration. The researcher collects data about concentration levels from different age groups and compares the data. Is this a longitudinal research or cross-sectional research? Why might have the researcher chosen that type of research?
Cross sectional
Cheaper, and less time-consuming. Longitudinal will take too long because they would have to wait for the person to grow old.
Explain how 2 types of triangulation (of your choice) can be done for the Rosenthal and Jacobson study.
Examples
Data triangulation
- perform same study at a different school in different country
Method triangulation
- do an interview on teachers on how they interact differently to kids with higher expectations
Researcher triangulation
- make different researchers do the same study
Theory triangulation
- take into consideration socio-cultural aspects of what "expectation" when interpreting data.