Scenario #1
Observation is a study methodology that involves carefully examining a situation to develop knowledge or gain inform. In this scenario, David is doing an observational study on the shopping behavior of the people outside a clothing shop that deals with both men and women wears. He is timing the duration the clients look in from the window before going in or moving on. The task of recording the duration each person takes looking in through the window, threatens the validity of the study. This is because sometimes there can be more than one person looking through the window thus ending up not doing the appropriate timing for each person, arriving at the different time.
This feature threatens an internal validity, whereby we consider those variables not properly operationalized. David being a single individual, it would be a strenuous task or to some extent prove impossible, to record the time each individual who stops outside the shop at different times to look for the commodities, spends. In such a situation, there could be several people coming at different time and living after the duration of their choice. It could be a hard task for one person to manage to observe correctly and record the time each individual takes at the window.
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The seriousness of the validity threat is that some the time recording might be wrong to some individual or some may even come and go without their record being taken. This would be even more serious if the location of the shop attracts many window show shoppers, in which many of they may even go unnoticed.
Scenario #2
Memory test is an important test that aims at evaluating the ability of an individual to remember thing or circumstances in a correct and accurate way. In the scenario, Jeanette is conducting a memory test using A-level students as her sample. She gives them a word learning material, which they first have to do while the music is playing and then in silence. The determination of the ability of the students to remember, based on the number of the words a student can remember, threatens the validity of the study. This is because, the two kinds of the environment the students are subjected to are quite different, and one cannot rule the memory ability of a person, based on the level of concentration. When students are disrupted by the music, some of them may find it difficult to pay attention and concentrate on the learning material meaning, the concentration may differ, which cannot determine the ability of an individual's memory.
This study threatens an external validity whereby, the task used, does not resemble the test the researcher wished to generalize. The use of music in the first test and silence in the second could be more effective if used to test the level of concentration of an individual, rather than the memory ability.
The seriousness of this scenario is that some people could have low concentration level bet have substantial memory ability. The ability to pay attention does not necessarily determine the memory level of a person. On the other hand, some individuals may pose a high level of concentration and pay attention to some issues, but have a low memory capacity to remember everything they might have heard or read.
Scenario #3
In this scenario, Peter is doing a correlation study on the impact of ICT in learning, whereby, he is looking for the relationship between the duration the students stay logged onto the school's network and the performance in their field of study. The objective of the study poses a threat to the validity of the study. That is, establishing the students' performance based on the time they stay logged onto the school's network. This is because the students may be using the school's network for other purposes not necessarily related to their field of study. For instance, a significant number of young people in the current world are spending most of their time on the internet visiting social media, whereby they chat, upload files while downloading others. So, being logged onto the school's network does not guarantee the administration that the students are researching academicals tasks.
This objective of the study threatens its validity in that; the extraneous variables are not adequately controlled. For instance, the school IT department can detect the traffic on their network correctly, but they cannot control the kind of work that the students are using the network. For this reason, the relationship between the duration the students spend on the school's network nay be irrational as the administration may expect.
For the objectives of such a study to bear positive fruits, the administration should devise a way of controlling the use of the school's network, only to be used on academic issues only. In this way, an accurate study can help to determine the relationship between the duration spent logged onto the school's network, and the performance of the students.
