People’s perception of how they spend their time at the gym is often not very accurate. Some spend more time chatting than on the treadmill. A psychologist decides to observe the actual behaviour of an opportunity sample of gym users at a local gym.
Explain why it is more appropriate for the psychologist to use an observation than a questionnaire in this case.
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A researcher placed an advert in a university psychology department asking for third year students to participate in a sleep experiment.
Each student had a sleep tracker watch to wear at home for the two-week study. Each morning they were asked to open the sleep tracker app to view their sleep quality data on their mobile phones. The students were unaware that the sleep data they could see on their phones had been manipulated by the researcher. Over the two weeks of the study, each student saw that he or she had had poor sleep quality for seven random nights of the experiment and good sleep quality for the remaining nights.
Every morning, after viewing the sleep data, each student completed a questionnaire about the previous night’s sleep. One of the questions asked the students to rate how well rested they felt, on a scale from 1–10, after the previous night’s sleep. Apart from this, students were asked to continue their normal everyday activities.
Apart from the question about how well rested the students felt, the researcher’s questionnaire contained nine other questions. The responses to these questions were not analysed.
Explain one reason why the researcher decided to include these additional questions on the questionnaire.
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A researcher placed an advert in a university psychology department asking for third year students to participate in a sleep experiment. Each student had a sleep tracker watch to wear at home for the two-week study. Each morning they were asked to open the sleep tracker app to view their sleep quality data on their mobile phones.
The students were unaware that the sleep data they could see on their phones had been manipulated by the researcher. Over the two weeks of the study, each student saw that he or she had had poor sleep quality for seven random nights of the experiment and good sleep quality for the remaining nights.
Every morning, after viewing the sleep data, each student completed a questionnaire about the previous night’s sleep. One of the questions asked the students to rate how well rested they felt, on a scale from 1–10, after the previous night’s sleep. Apart from this, students were asked to continue their normal everyday activities.
Explain one limitation of assessing sleep quality using a rating scale of 1–10.
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A psychologist wanted to investigate whether exercise would affect stress levels in 15-year-olds. Previous research into the effects of exercise on stress in teenagers had shown that exercise decreased stress levels.
The psychologist decided to use a repeated measures design to investigate the effects of exercise on stress levels in 20 15-year-old students. All the students were approaching their end-of-year exams.
For Condition A, students were required to complete a 2 km run during their morning breaktime each school day for one week.
In Condition B, students continued their normal activities in the playground during their morning breaktime each school day for one week.
At the end of each week of the investigation, for both Condition A and Condition B, each student was asked to rate their levels of stress on a rating scale of 1–10, where the higher the self-reported rating the greater the stress levels.
Students self-reported their stress levels on a scale of 1–10.
Explain how this might have affected the validity of the data collected.
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A new TV programme has been developed to increase positive social behaviours in pre-school children.
There is a proposal to carry out an experiment to compare the effects of the new TV programme and an existing TV programme, on positive social behaviours in pre-school children.
A sample of 500 pre-school children and their parents is available for the experiment. The parents have given consent for their children to take part in this experiment.
The experiment will take place over an 8-week period. Data on the children’s social behaviours will be gathered from the parents using a self-report method.
Design the experiment to investigate whether watching the new TV programme leads to an increase in positive social behaviours in the children, compared with watching the existing TV programme.
In your answer you will gain credit for providing appropriate details of the following:
the type of experimental design, with justification
a self-report method of data collection, with justification
how to control one extraneous variable, with justification as to why this would need to be controlled.
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