¶ … old timer says, "Why, in my day, kids were much more respectful and didn't cause as much trouble as they do nowadays!" It may seem like a statement that is impossible to test. In fact, one of the reasons that "in my day" type statements may be so popular is because they are difficult to test, and, therefore, difficult to disprove. However, this statement is actually relatively easy to test. While one cannot retroactively test to see if kids were really more respectful, it is fairly easy to test whether kids got in as much trouble in the past as they do at the present time. First one needs to pick a variable that stands in for a measurement of how much trouble kids actually cause. It is important to pick this variable carefully, so that the test is valid. Test validity refers to "the degree in which our test or other measuring device is truly measuring what we intended it to measure" (AllPsych, 2003). This can be done by using variables that are known to correlate with the item being tested (Shuttleworth, 2008). One variable that is known to measure...
Therefore, to test the old timer's statement, one could come up with the following hypothesis: Kids going to high school in the 1958-1959 school year were given detention less frequently than kids attending high school in the 2011-2012 school year. The number of detentions would be related to the number of times students got into trouble at the school.
The hypothesis could be tested by selecting a high school and comparing the number of detentions it gave out in the 1958-1959 school year with the number of detentions in the 2011-2012 school year. However, one would need to carefully select the high school to ensure that the same things were being measured. The high school would have to give detentions for the same things now as it did in the past, have the same socio-economic composition, and have the same ethnic and cultural composition to ensure that it was a change in times, not a change in other demographic factors, which led to a change in number…
