19  Explore, apply, reflect

🏢 Lab class

Ethics activity

Please download the ethics activity document to see the instructions for the activity.


You can use the BPS Code of Human Research Ethics to help you identify ethical issues with the scenarios described in the ethics activity document.

The following document is password-protected. We will tell you the password in the lab class.

🏠 Self-study

Good measurement

We would like you to think a bit more about what good measurement constitutes and how reliability and validity are related to good measurement. For this reason, we would like you to complete the below activities from Beth’s book. They are formative and will not contribute to your overall module mark. You can complete the activities on your own, as a pair or as a small group.

Activity 1

Educational psychologists use teacher ratings of classroom shyness (on a nine-point scale, where 1 = “not at all shy in class” and 9 = “very shy in class”) to measure children’s temperament. Indicate which kinds of reliability would need to be evaluated. Then, draw a scatterplot indicating that the measure has good reliability and another one indicating the measure has poor reliability.

Activity 2

Consider how you might validate the nine-point classroom shyness rating scale.

  • First, what behaviours might be relevant for establishing this rating’s criterion validity? Draw a scatterplot showing the results of a study in which the classroom shyness rating has good criterion validity.
  • Second, come up with ways to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity of this rating system. What traits should correlate strongly with shyness? What traits should correlate only weakly or not at all? Explain why you chose those traits. Draw a scatterplot showing good convergent validity and a scatterplot showing good discriminant validity.

Feedback

We previously asked some students to submit their answers on Moodle. The feedback below is based on these submissions. Please complete the activities before downloading the file - doing so will be much more beneficial for your learning progress!