Repeated Measures Design Using Privileged Words

Repeated measures design was used in this experiment because the condition using black words was used as a control against the condition using coloured words. Therefore, participants would have to have taken part in both conditions to act as a control variable as different participants would have different capacities, in terms of STM. A repeated measures design is when the same group of participants take part in both of the conditions of the study that is being carried out. The key variable within this experiment is the independent variable of words being written in colour or in black. The independent variable is whether the words were written in colour or in black, and the dependant variable was the amount of words that were recalled in each condition by all of the participants. An example of an
extraneous variable that could have been present in this investigation was that the participants could have showed demand characteristics, by guessing the aim of the experiment and therefore, thinking of a way to remember more words in one condition. A further extraneous variable could be that the participants may be using a memory improvement strategy in order to remember the words, rather than using the coloured words. An ethical issue for this study is that it could have been stressful for participants to know how they performed in the task if they thought that they did better than they actually did.
Therefore, this can easily be overcome by not giving out the scores of the participants to ensure that they do not become stressed over knowing their results in both conditions. 8 participants were used in this experiment and were all aged 17 however, both males and females were used in this investigation. The sampling method that was used was random sampling to ensure that a biased sample was not used, on reason a biased sample was not used is that participants weren’t selected for certain reasons, and another reason is that it prevents a certain group of participants from applying to take part in the study. Participants were not allocated to certain groups in this investigation because, although there were two conditions, each participant took part in both conditions therefore, participants didn’t have to be allocated to specific groups. Each participant was tested individually, in a room without distractions in order to ensure that their full concentration was on the
investigation. Participants read and signed a consent form and were given basic instructions to read in order to ensure they knew what was expected of them to do. The participant was then given the list of 20 words written in black and a timer was started for 1 minute. At the end of the minute, the word list was taken away, and the participant had to recall as many words as possible. Once the participant repeated 3 words that they had already stopped, they were told to stop recalling words and were given the list of 20 words written in colour. Again, participants were given 1 minute to look at these words before being asked to recall as many as they could. As in the first condition, once a participant had repeated 3 words that they had previously stated, they were told to stop and their results were recorded in a basic table. Finally, each participant was then given a debrief sheet explaining that they should contact the researcher if they felt as if they received any form of psychological harm during the course of the experiment.