Previous Measures : How can we improve?

Hi everyone, As mentioned before, an aspect of future research that should be considered is how to revise a study in order to raise its validity and reliability, which will give us more accurate results. I have some additional ideas on solutions to fixing the limitations that were mentioned by GennaFerreira.

1. Solutions to reduce social desirability I found the following methods in the following article: Nederhof, A. (1985). Methods of coping with social desirability bias: A review. European Journal of Social Psychology, 15, 263-280.

• Neutral Questions
  • We should try to make questions that are as neutral as possible, so that it may not be seen as something that a person should answer in a specific way (a socially desirable way) by many different social groups.
• The Bogus Pipeline
  • Participants are told that either an attitude or emotion is being analyzed by a machine, or by a polygraph. However, the wires that are attached to the participant are not real. Since the participant does not know this, they will most likely answer the questions honestly.

2. Solutions to having a more valid and reliable study

• The sample size needs to be much larger; having a few hundred will be more effective than having less than a hundred. This will help eliminate individual differences. Moreover, by having a larger sample, we will be able to have a more equal number of females to males.
• As GennaFerreira mentioned, having random sampling will create less differences between individuals. Therefore, we should be using the random sampling technique to include not only Psychology students but the general public as well.
• In order to increase reliability, this questionnaire should be distributed more times to different samples to see if the results are still the same between different groups (ex. between students, parents etc.). We can also ask multiple questions about the same idea, in order to see if participants are answering it in the same way throughout the questionnaire (I believe we did have a few of these throughout the questionnaire).