Your friend, Tania, is asking your advice on her new study design. She is conducting a study on whether milk chocolate consumpti
on prior to a memory task will improve recall performance as compared to consuming white chocolate. She decides to include three participants in each group. You tell her that she should likely have more participants or she will lack ______ validity.
Your friend, Tania, is asking your advice on her new study design. She is conducting a study on whether milk chocolate consumption prior to a memory task will improve recall performance as compared to consuming white chocolate. She decides to include three participants in each group. You tell her that she should likely have more participants or she will lack <u>content</u> validity. Content validity has to do with whether your research subjects or respondents are representative of all aspect of your research construct. Increasing the sample size or the number of replicates per treatment increases the construct validity by increasing the degree of freedom and reducing experimental error. Increasing the sample size will make the study a more representation of the entire study population.
I believe the correct answer is the final option - check her records against her bank statement. This way she can carefully compare the bank statement and her own records in order to see if there are any incongruities. It is possible that she made a mistake, or that the bank implemented some changes which it is charging her for.
