COMM 400 Lecture 8: 2/19 notes: Chapter 5

• School: George Mason University
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 400
• Professor: Botan

Document Summary

Must be able to explain how what you did was valid research (operational definitions, etc. ) Asks is research conducted so that it leads to accurate findings about the phenomena being investigated for the particular group of people or texts studied? . Threats: how research is conducted, effects due to participants, effects due to the researcher(s) Giving candy to one group of participants and not the other(s) External validity : concerns the generalizability of the findings from a research study. Asks whether the conclusions from a particular study can be applied to other people/texts, places, and/or times. Trade-offs in social science research: if you want more external validity, you must sacrifice some internal validity and vice versa. Measurement validity : refers to how well researchers measure what they intend to measure. It refers to the ability of a measurement technique to tap the referents of the concepts being investigated.