Bias, Internal Validity, External Validity, and Reliability.

¶ … bias, internal validity, external validity, and reliability.

There are several important issues with the research conducted by this anonymous female student that impacts the reliability and validity of her findings. Firstly, it appears that the researcher formulated her hypothesis before she had gathered all the facts available regarding the topic which is a major issue. She has an opinion that lower income people vote less than those with higher incomes and seems to have looked for data to support the hypothesis rather than forming a hypothesis which accounts for the data. In addition, in the question regarding this hypothetical research it is stated that she searched the internet and library, but there is no information as to the quality or reliability of the sources that she used in her research which also calls her findings into question. I would also be concerned with the world almanac she is using as the primary data for her research. An almanac of this time is not exactly a peer-reviewed source. To find out the voter turnouts and home ownership within the states, the researcher should look at documents collected by the individual states in question. This would provide more reliable data as to the numbers.

Internal validity is an issue within this research. She uses the average income of families within the state in order to measure the overall economic status of the voters. Once the average has been found she compares this to the ratio of voter turnout to registered voters. However, in averaging the data she would be including both people who do vote and those that do not. Therefore the ratios she is working with are not equal. To corroborate her data she examines the amount of people within the states who own homes, but this is not necessarily a good way to measure this value. There are plenty of people with money who choose to rent homes rather than rent and there are people who own homes but who are nowhere near financially sound.

b. What can she do to improve her design?

In order to improve the design of her research, the person must reevaluate her source material. This is only the first step. She used a world almanac as the primary source for her findings, but this is a much generalized source and may not be accurate in the statistics it provides. The researcher needs to look at reports from the states themselves and use actual primary sources as primary sources. To use statistical data, it needs to be accurate and therefore she should be able to locate the same numbers in multiple places. If this cannot be done, then her entire argument is called into question.