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Research methods in psychology
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Lecture notes on research methods in psychology for first years students.
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Two key terms in research methods are reliability and validity because they have an impacton the veracity of research findings. When planning and carrying out research, psychologists
must take these factors into account. They are also used to judge how well a piece of
research is done.
Validity:
The results' accuracy and representativeness are measured by their validity. Validity comes
in two flavours: internal and external.
Internal: Questions about whether the IV was manipulated to produce the desired results
and whether confounding variables were also present.
External: Discusses how well the findings can be applied to different contexts.
Temporal validity: This refers to how well the findings can be applied to various time
periods.
Whether or not the experimental findings can be extrapolated to other contexts,
particularly from artificial or controlled settings to real-world environments, is referred to as
ecological validity.
Reliability
Temporal relevance
It speaks to our capacity for generalising the findings across various time periods.
Ecological Validity is the degree to which the findings of an experiment can be extrapolated
to other contexts, particularly from artificial or controlled settings to natural environments.
How consistently the results occur is referred to as reliability. Will the same or very similar
outcomes be obtained if the experiment is repeated, in other words? If the response is
affirmative, the study can be described as having high reliability.
It is possible to increase reliability by creating uniform measurement methods. Internal
reliability and external reliability are the two types.
Internal reliability refers to how consistent a test is within itself. For instance, for a
questionnaire measuring high levels of obedience, the respondent must receive the same
score on each question for the questionnaire to be deemed internally reliable.
External reliability is a term used to describe how consistently a test performs over time. For
instance, if someone scored 120 on the IQ test (test of intelligence), we would anticipate
that person to score the same if they were tested again in, say, 8 months. This would
demonstrate the test's reliability from the outside.
The degree to which two or more observers agree on the behaviours they observe is
referred to as inter-observer reliability. By comparing the two (or more) sets of observations
to see if they positively correlate, we can assess the inter-rater reliability. If their correlation
is +0.8 or higher, we can infer that they have consistently observed the same behaviours
and that inter-observer reliability is high.
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