PSY 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Observer-Expectancy Effect, Naturalistic Observation, Participant Observation
16 Nov 2020
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Interviews can be used successfully with groups that cannot be studied through surveys or questionnaires, such as young children. Descriptive studies need to guard against bias: reactivity: the phenomenon that occurs when knowledge that one is being observed alters the behavior being observed. Experimenter expectancy effect: experimenter expectancy effect: an actual change in the behavior of the people or non- human animals being observed that is due to the expectations of the observer. As a result, the researcher cannot be confident that another unmeasured variable is not the actual cause of the differences in the variables of interest: texting and driving: correlated with driving dangerously. Risk taking, c, causes some people to text while driving. Risk taking, the third variable, might also cause some people to drive dangerously. It would be unethical to induce trauma in some soldiers for the purpose of collecting data and comparing the different groups.
