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Common demand characteristics include: Rumors of the study – any information, true or false, circulated about the experiment outside of the experiment itself.; Setting of the laboratory – the location where the experiment is being performed, if it is significant.
When conducting experiments in psychology, some believe that there is always a trade-off between internal and external validity— having enough control over the situation to ensure that no extraneous variables are influencing the results and to randomly assign people to conditions, and; ensuring that the results can be generalized to everyday ...
By using one of these methods to account for nuisance variables, researchers can enhance the internal validity of their experiments, ensuring that the effects observed are more likely attributable to the manipulated variables rather than extraneous influences. In the first example provided above, the sex of the patient would be a nuisance variable.
An example of a descriptive device used in psychological research is the diary, which is used to record observations. There is a history of use of diaries within clinical psychology. [20] Examples of psychologists that used them include B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) and Virginia Axline (1911–1988).
For example, in a study examining the effect of post-secondary education on lifetime earnings, some extraneous variables might be gender, ethnicity, social class, genetics, intelligence, age, and so forth. A variable is extraneous only when it can be assumed (or shown) to influence the dependent variable.
In the behavioral sciences, ecological validity is often used to refer to the judgment of whether a given study's variables and conclusions (often collected in lab) are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the "real world" context). Psychological studies are usually conducted in laboratories though the goal of these studies is to ...
By controlling for the extraneous variables, the researcher can come closer to understanding the true effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. In this context the extraneous variables can be controlled for by using multiple regression. The regression uses as independent variables not only the one or ones whose effects on ...
A true experiment would, for example, randomly assign children to a scholarship, in order to control for all other variables. Quasi-experiments are commonly used in social sciences, public health, education, and policy analysis, especially when it is not practical or reasonable to randomize study participants to the treatment condition.