Psychology

Questionnaire

Project description

Holly is a midwife and studying part time for a degree in psychology. For her final year assessment she is required to carry out a small-scale research project. Her experience on the neonatal unit has made her very interested in mother-infant interaction, particularly how infants imitate their mothers’ gestures. She wants to investigate whether mothers who make more facial and hand gestures cause more imitation of these gestures in their infant. She notices that existing studies on imitation have largely been conducted in the laboratory, creating very unnatural surroundings for the mother and infant. She feels this limits what we can learn from these studies so she decides to observe mother-infant interactions in a local coffee shop – somewhere she knows many mothers take their infants and interact with them naturally. Before recording her observations, she develops a coding scheme where she decides what facial expressions and gestures she will count. She decides to sample behaviour in a two-minute window during which she records the frequency of infant and mother hand and facial gestures. Each infant-mother pair is given a unique number so there will be no risk of identifying individuals from their data.

To ensure the most naturalistic observations possible, she observes and records the interactions first – after all, people behave differently when they know they are being watched. Immediately after the observations are over she approaches the mother to collect some additional data. Holly asks the mothers about the child’s sex, age and its birth weight – a colleague working on the same ward as Holly is interested in the relationship between birth weight and sex. Rather than inconvenience the mothers with a trip to hospital she decides to collect this data at the same time and share it with her colleague later. Because the mothers are in a public place and the data have been anonymized she decides there is no reason to gain written consent.

After collecting the data she puts all the information into a table.

Table 1 Raw data for Holly’s mother-infant imitation study

Frequency of Gestures

Mother-Infant Pair Number Mother Infant Age (months)

Infant Sex

M=Male; F=Female)

Infant birth weight (grams)

1 3 5 9 F 3100

2 18 18 16 F 2700

3 15 13 15 F 3200

4 4 6 12 M 2800

5 30 24 24 F 3100

6 21 11 16 M 2800

7 2 0 9 F 3000

8 25 20 18 F 4000

9 8 7 13 F 2700

10 11 17 19 F 3150

To analyze the data, Holly begins by plotting a graph

Figure 1 Infant-Mother Gesture Rate

After plotting and analyzing all the gesture data, Holly finds a strong relationship (a correlation of R=.78) between the mother and infant gestures, such that mothers who make more gestures tend to have infants that gesture more. This means that 78% of the variation in mothers’ gesture rates is associated with the variation in their infants’ gesture rates. Holly generalizes from her sample to conclude that mothers who make more facial and hand gestures cause more imitation of these gestures in their infant.

QUESTIONS

1)Are there any problems with the reliability of the measures that Holly used? How could the reliability of the measures be improved? (10 marks)

2)Are there any problems with the validity of the measures that Holly used? How could the validity of the measures be improved? (10 marks)

3)Briefly explain whether Table 1 shows correlations or contingencies in gesture rate. Are there any factors (other than mother gesture rate) that could explain the variation in infants’ gesture rate? (15 marks)

4)How adequately does this study follow the British Psychological Society’s Code of Human Research Ethics. Explain how any flaws could be corrected. (10 marks)

5)Has this study broken any principles of good practice in data collection? If so, how could this be addressed? (10 marks)

6)Holly wants to generalize her results to all mothers and infants but how representative of the wider population are her results? (15 marks)

7)Do you think the evidence warrants Holly’s conclusion that ‘mothers who make more facial and hand gestures cause more imitation gestures in the infant’? If it doesn’t, how could Holly investigate that claim? (10 marks)