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Ensuring Reliability in Psychological Research Across Methods

Explore the concept of reliability in psychological research and learn how to improve reliability across various research methods. Understand the importance of reliability in drawing conclusions from data and discover techniques to enhance reliability in questionnaires, interviews, and observational studies.

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Ensuring Reliability in Psychological Research Across Methods

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Immediate activity • What is this an example of?

  2. What is reliability in psychological research and how an we ensure that we have it? How to improve reliability across a range of research methods What is meant by reliability and how it can be achieved across a range of research methods Exam technique and application of concepts ?

  3. Reliability is a measure of consistencyWatch the clip and explain in what way the England football team could be described as reliable. Build

  4. Ensuring reliability in questionnaires and interviews • Be like Joey ask the same question to the same people on different occasions • This is the test re test method

  5. When can we say our results are reliable? When the results from both sets of questionnaires or interviews have been correlated and you have a positive correlation of +.8 or above It ain’t great unless its +.8 If your results are not reliable then you can’t draw conclusions from

  6. Inter observer reliability We are going to see how inter observer reliability works. When conducting observations psychologists usually work in at least pairs to reduce subjectivity. Each person watches the same events and records their data independently then the data collected is correlated and again if you get a strong positive correlation of +.8 then you can state that your behaviour categories are reliable. We are now going to conduct a short observation using event sampling focusing on competitive behaviour in 4 year olds completing an egg building challenge. Our hypothesis is that boys will exhibit more competitive behaviour than girls. Our first step is to create our behaviour categories Note: A similar approach is taken for content analysis called inter rater reliability.

  7. Why that +.8 is important

  8. How could we make it better? • How could we improve questionnaires to make them more reliable? Consider these examples: • Where do you like to shop? 2) Transfer

  9. Improving reliability in Interviews Will different interviewers get the same results?

  10. Lab experiments • Lab experiments are often seen as one of the most reliable methods, why? • What things could undermine the reliability of the experiment?

  11. Over to you • Complete the questions carefully to show how reliability could be increased in each of the scenarios. Transfer

  12. Exam questions In an observational study, 100 cars were fitted with video cameras to record the driver’s behaviour. Two psychologists used content analysis to analyse the data from the films. They found that 75% of accidents involved a lack of attention by the driver. The most common distractions were using a hands-free phone or talking to a passenger. Other distractions included looking at the scenery, smoking, eating, personal grooming and trying to reach something within the car. Explain how the two psychologists might have assessed the reliability of their content analysis. (3 marks) AQA A PSYA4 June 2013 Q20

  13. Exam questions Outline one way of checking the reliability of a psychological test. (2 marks) A researcher decided to check the reliability of the questionnaire about attitudes to smoking. Three weeks later he instructed each of his students to re-test their two participants, using the same questionnaire. A correlation was calculated between the participants’ original scores and their re-test scores. The correlation coefficient was +.89 and this was significant at the 1% level. What does the correlation coefficient of +.89 indicate about the reliability of the scale? Explain your answer. (2 marks) Explain how a psychologist would use the test-retest method to check for reliability. (3 marks) Explain how inter-observer reliability could be checked. (2 marks)

  14. Exam questions A psychologist hypothesised that boys show more aggression than girls. He went to a local primary school to study children’s behaviour at playtime. He made an observation sheet which contained several categories such as physical and verbal aggression. Outline one methodological problem of using only one observer. (2 marks) How could the reliability of this study be improved? (2 marks)

  15. Exam questions Explain how a psychologist would use the test-retest method to check for reliability. (3 marks) Explain how inter-observer reliability could be checked. (2 marks) A psychologist hypothesised that boys show more aggression than girls. He went to a local primary school to study children’s behaviour at playtime. He made an observation sheet which contained several categories such as physical and verbal aggression. Outline one methodological problem of using only one observer. (2 marks) How could the reliability of this study be improved? (2 marks)

  16. Homework reminder • Notes on page 69 Validity for Wednesday's lesson

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