Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 142

Single-blind experiment: Research design in which participants are unaware of the conditions to which they have been assigned.

Double-blind experiment: Research design in which both the participant and the researcher are unaware of the condition to which the participant has been assigned.

Role attitude cues: When participants approach research with a particular attitude, such as cooperativeness; may affect results.

Cooperative attitude: Attitude of research participant who tries to help the researcher.

Ideally, we would like to have people participate in research who have no preconceived notions of what is going to be asked of them. As we know, we are dealing with humans who have schemas of the way the world works (refer to Chapter 1). Participants may think that certain kinds of behaviors are expected of them because they are in a research laboratory (for example, that it is inappropriate to challenge the experimenter about any aspect of the research). Also, students who have taken no courses in the social sciences differ in their level of naiveté or sophistication (as well as in their skepticism and hypotheses regarding deception) from those who have taken such courses. Students who have taken courses may respond with “insight rather than naiveté” (Adair, 1973, p. 19), which can be a problem for the researcher. John Adair’s book The Human Subject: The Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment emphasizes that the research endeavor is a social interaction and that participants are not necessarily passive. Participants may attempt to determine the hypotheses of the study and in doing so threaten the internal validity of the research.

You may not be able to control participants’ attitudes, but given Adair’s (1973) claim that “the experimenter is half of this social interaction” and the experimenter’s “contribution to the data must be assessed or controlled” (p. 65), you can reduce the variability in your own behavior. You might consider tape-recording the instructions participants receive or at the very least reading the instructions from a prepared script and having a predetermined protocol for answering questions. In more extreme cases, you may need to resort to a single-blind or double-blind experiment (discussed later in the chapter).

Based on preexisting ideas of what is expected as a research participant and/or people’s general temperament, participants may want to see the researcher (and the research itself) succeed or fail. Adair (1973) provided useful categorizations (called role attitude cues) of these preexisting attitudes of participants, which vary from positive to moderately negative. The first attitude is the cooperative attitude (pp. 26–28); Adair states that those with cooperative attitudes will approach any experimental situation with that cooperative attitude “where there are no compelling cues to the contrary” (p. 26). To characterize this cooperative attitude, Adair cites the work of Martin Orne (1962), which showed the extent to which participants are willing to go to please the experimenter, including participating in a meaningless task for several hours. The second attitude that Adair presents is the defensive or apprehensive attitude (pp. 28–30). Participants with this attitude are often worried their abilities will be measured, given their cultural understanding of what it is that researchers do. Such concerns may lead to attempts to perform even better on the research tasks than otherwise would have been the case. The third role attitude is the negative attitude (pp. 30–32). Participants with this attitude may go out of their way to sabotage or otherwise act counter to what they perceive to be the purpose of the experiment. These participants may also simply answer as quickly as possible to exit the situation, taking less time on the research than careful attention would require. Adair cites research that has shown that participants who participate in research to meet a course requirement are more likely to have a negative attitude than are those who simply volunteer. The social skills of the researcher are important in working to create a positive research experience, whatever the participant’s initial motivation. “Subjects should not be treated as inert objects for study. Not only is their awareness of the experiment’s purposes a problem, but their attitudes, feelings, and motivations toward research must be considered” (Adair, 1973, p. 32).

Defensive or apprehensive attitude: Attitude of participant who is concerned about performance evaluation.

Negative attitude: Attitude of a participant who wants to undermine the research.