Research Methods Exercise on Internal Validity

1. You are interested in the stability of people’s attitudes toward campus safety. You give out a questionnaire, then plan to follow up the questionnaire two weeks later. In the meantime, a rape occurs on campus. What threat to internal validity is happening here? How could you prevent it?

2. You are comparing a new technique for teaching mathematics to the traditional approach in two elementary school classrooms. The first teacher volunteered to use the new technique, while the other teacher is teaching math as usual. What is the internal validity threat? How could you prevent it?

3. Your survey of personality and aggressive tendencies is 300 questions long and takes participants a couple of hours to complete. What is the threat to internal validity? How could you prevent it?

4. In an observation study, the observers code behaviors for hours at a time. What is the threat? How could it be prevented?

5. You give participants a self-esteem questionnaire, then choose people who are especially low or high in self-esteem to participate in your experiment. In the experiment, you try to modify their self-esteem with test feedback. What is the threat? How could you get around it?