At 3:47 PM -0400 10/22/99, dawn blasko wrote:
>At 09:52 AM 10/22/99 -0500, Paul Brandon wrote:
>>Barring a major change in the contingencies set by society, the only answer
>>is replication, both direct and systematic.
>
>There are other factors that could play an important role, such as
>differences from lab to lab in small methodological and environmental
>details ranging from time of day to environmental context cues.
>One powerful factor that can lead to non replication are subject
>differences. For example, if a cognitive study originally run at a school
>with a relatively homogeneous group of students with average SATs of 1400,
>is not replicated at a school with a much wider range of students and
>average SATS of 950 it may not be at all surprising. These studies are
>extremely important because they often require us to reject, qualify or
>revise our existing (usually too simple theories) to include the influence
>of factors like individual differences.
>Dawn
As obvious a case as this would technically be a systematic replication,
not a direct one, since you've introduced a change in the subject variable.
This is how one establishes the generality of one's findings.
A direct replication would hold all known variables constant within the
limits of our measuring instruments. One would assume that any outcome
differences would be due to some variable that was nonetheless inadequately
controlled.
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Dept Minnesota State University, Mankato *
* 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 *
* http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/psych/welcome.html *
