Whenever I read and psych research, I always have the same
question, how do we know that what the participants report is true?
Participants can easily be bored by the questionnaire and skip questions, be in
time constraint and rush through the report, or simply do not feel like telling
the truth. How do we account for their results? I am, of course, not the only
one who is concerned with this problem. There are many criticism that question
the validity of psychological research, which uses interviews, questionnaires,
observations and other research methods that are involves too much subjective
judgment and give rise to suspicion.
The research that I am involved in right now is susceptible
to this question of validity. Participants have to recall a story. When I code
their recall, I cannot suppress the feeling that some people just did not take
the study seriously. They stop at awkward endings, skip important episodes, or
recalled way too little. I am not sure that I can trust that all of them used
their most effort to do the recalling task. Having this concern, I thought of a
way that might help. What if we ask the participants to sign an honor code that
says that they would recall to their best ability and that everything they
write are their true memory? Would an honor code serve as a judge who stops the
participants from rushing over a study? I thought of another way, which is to
control the time of recall. We can make sure that the participants have to stay
in the computer room for half an hour to do the task. They can take longer if
they want, but to leave early is not allowed. The participants would have no
reason for rushing over a study because they have to take the half an hour.
We can study whether participants will give longer recalls
if we make them stay in the lab for a certain amount of time. The control group
would leave when they are finished, but the experimental group has to stay for
at least half an hour before they can leave. Half an hour is longer than the
average length of recall.
I predict that the honor code group and the group that is
required to take more time will give longer and more accurate recalls.
This study will have implications on how to improve the
quality of participants’ self-report data. We can further extrapolate the question
whether honor code really works.