8110 Wk6 Dis

Week 6 Colleague Responses 1

Assignment #2 Task

In a 200 word response Respond to a classmate by offering a strategy to address the ethical issue she or he identified.

Lori Platko Response:

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Threat to Internal Validity

According to Burkholder (2019) there are eight threats to internal validity including “history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, statistical regression to the mean, researcher bias, selection, overall mortality (attrition), and differential mortality” (pp. 183-185). Focusing on one threat to extrapolate how to mitigate it, we shall focus on selection. Selection refers to how the group or cohort is formed for the research. Groups may be formed through volunteering, meeting a specific criterion, or at random. An ethical issue for qualitative research involving selection suffices as if a particular criterion strategically chooses the group. This may be a threat for future data collection from having a causal effect on the selection and outcomes. An example of this is if research is conducted on teacher attrition in particular programming in urban, Title I schools, to randomly choose a sample of teachers according to a specific criterion (number of years teaching, urban school district – and specify what an urban school district entails, Title I school – and specify what a Title I school is). A way to mitigate this is to use a random sample.

Threat to External Validity

An overview of external threats to validity, explained by Burkholder (2019), include “interactions of the observed causal relationships with sample units, treatment variations, types of outcomes measures used, settings in which the treatment was delivered, and context-dependent mediation” (p. 187). The external threat for our focus will be the setting in which the treatment was delivered. This means that the factors of the environment may affect the results instead of the actual treatment having the effect. An example of this involves researching teacher retention in Title I schools – an ethical issue for qualitative research involving this may include an entity where the external threat may occur if the same research involved urban versus rural schools. To mitigate this is to be aware of factors that enhance generalization but prohibit the context of the study.  

Amenable to Scientific Study

For research to be amenable to scientific study, it must be trustworthy (Burkholder, 2019). This means that there is confidence or trust in the sources used to gather the data.  This correlates with validity, and there are three variances to check for validity. Observer effects (Burkholder, 2019) refer to the possible contamination of the instruments used to conduct research. Multiple researchers are used to ensuring the data will be conducted consistently. Finally, member checks check for patterns among the participants checking for accuracy (Burkholder, 2019).  

Reference

Burkholder, G. J., Cox, K. A., Crawford, L. M., & Hitchcock, J. H. (2019). Research Design and

Methods. SAGE Publications, Inc. (US). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781544342375

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