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Chapter 2: Research Design |
Threats to external validityTwo types of external validity follow. Population validity. To what population can you generalise the results of the study? This will depend on the makeup of the people in your sample and how they were chosen. If you have used young, white middle class, above average intelligence, Western students as your subjects, can you really say your results apply to all people? Ecological validity. Laboratory studies are necessarily artificial. Many variables are controlled and the situation is contrived. A study has higher ecological validity if it generalises beyond the laboratory to more realistic field settings. |
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