Question

Dr. Paddock is a counseling psychologist who is interested in decreasing adjustment issues in first-year college students. She is curious if having students create collages of their first few weeks of school and then mailing them home will help students feel they have integrated their new life with their old and, as a result, will help them feel less homesick. She samples a group of 100 incoming college freshmen at her university and measures how homesick they are during the first week of school. During Week 4 of school, she has them make the collage and send it home. During Week 7 of school, she measures their homesickness again. She notices a significant reduction in the amount of homesickness from the pretest to the posttest and concludes that her treatment is effective.

Imagine in Dr. Paddock’s study that only 90 of the original participants completed the measure of homesickness during Week 7 (10 participants had left the university and were unavailable). Name two things that Dr. Paddock can do to address this possible threat to internal validity and why these should be done.

Answer 1

Internal validity is ascertaining that independent variable has an effect on the direct variable. In other words, understanding the casual relationship between the variables. Dr. Paddock can get consent from the subjects before participating, can explain the study and its purpose to get involvement. He also has to look into other factors which can come into the play like the mood of the students. These two factors would address the internal validity issues.

Addressing the internal validity issues is important, because only then the experiment will study the intended and produce accurate results.