Social Psychology -- Methodology Observation (incl. participant obs.) Archival analysis – type of observational method, the researcher examines the accumulated documents of a culture Inter-judge reliability = the level of agreement between 2 or more people who observe and code data Correlational method/correlation coefficient (e.g. surveys) Experiments

Social Psychology -- Methodology David Sears (1986) has shown that since the 1960 ’ s over 80% of social psychology studies have relied on college students tested in the laboratory context. The majority of these students were enrolled in undergraduate psychology courses Can you think of any issues here?

Internal Validity in Experiments Keeping everything the same but the IV OR making sure that nothing else besides the IV can affect the DV Accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables Differences among participants are minimized by random selection and random assignment to condition What does this mean?

External Validity in Experiments By gaining enough control over the situation (for internal validity), the situation can become artificial and distant from real life. What is external validity?

E.V. = Generalizability Across Situations Researchers strive to make their studies as realistic as possible Mundane realism: the extent to which the experiment is similar to real-life situations Psychological realism: the extent to which psychological processes triggered are similar to processes that occur in everyday life (rationale for cover stories) Making an experiment realistic takes lots of creative talent from the researchers

E.V. = Generalizability Across People The only way to be certain that the results of an experiment represent the behavior of a population is to ensure that participants are randomly selected This is impractical & expensive If we accept the premise that there are psych. Processes shared by all people in all places, & these processes are being studied in experiments, then we don ’ t need participants from all over the globe

E.V. = Replication Ultimate test of experiment ’ s external validity When results are somewhat variable, researchers resort to meta-analysis Averages the results of 2 or more studies to see if the effect of an IB is reliable

E.V. = Cross-Cultural Studies Our understanding of the e.v. of many findings can be enriched by doing cross-cultural studies Two main goals: to explore similarities and differences between cultures Emic/Etic Distinction Emic: the study of the specific or local Etic: the study of the universal characteristics of societies

Last Thoughts on External Validity Laboratory method = high internal validity However, we can be less sure that the results have high external validity