Essay Example on Both groups are paid equal amounts of attention

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Hawthorne strong If both groups are paid equal amounts of attention and receive similar instructional sessions in terms of duration then observed effects can more likely be attributed to the treatment intervention I believe the authors did a good job of providing the same instructions and guides to both treatment hereafter referred to as cases and control groups throughout the study Diffusion strong For this threat as long as the cases and control group had no interaction or discussion during the study this should not be an issue And I believe the authors could have explained this more in details but based on the methods description I did not find any evidence of diffusion effect History strong In this study the history effect was not mentioned And even if there were not one the authors should have mentioned it However this effect is not an issue for two group design because the effect would have affected both cases and control groups the same theoretically Maturation medium strong Considering that the age range of the participants i e 11 to 54 years old this effect could have affected the changes in the dependent variable However with regard to the normal developmental processes this effect is less likely to be present in this study due to the nature of this study i e cross sectional Testing strong Testing effect usually occurs for one group study and this effect was not present in this study Instrumentation strong

 The instrumentation effect could occur when observed differences are due to a change in the measuring instrument for the outcome variable However there was not an instrumentation effect observed for this study because the measurement method did not change throughout the study Regression strong The statistical regression effect is not a threat in the two group design because the participants in both treatment and control groups are equally affected by this effect There was no evidence suggesting that the treatment group had individuals who were more likely to have extreme scores on the dependent variable Selection bias strong Based on the method descriptions the participants were assigned by random selection i e everybody had an equal chance of being selected either in the cases or control group So selection bias is less of an issue in this study Attrition or mortality strong For this study there was no report on the dropout rate or numbers who declined to take the survey during the study So as long as there was no drop out rate or the dropout rate was similar between the treatment and control groups this effect would not be affecting the internal validity II

External validity Sampling bias medium strong Based on the method description it seems that the sample was collected through random sampling so I believe that the sampling bias is not of a major issue However it would have been good to know about the response rate In addition the authors talked about self selection bias due to the selection of participants only in a hunter safety class which could indicate that they are at less risk than other gun users So this study could be applicable to other gun owners who uses for hunting purposes within Michigan area Ecological weak medium Ecological validity could be low due to the different setting of answering the survey questions which could affect the behavior of the participants because the participants might feel uneasy and perform in a different way compared to answering questionnaires in a regular setting Although the authors briefly talked about the gun safety class characteristics e g 10 hour class they did not go much in details about the classroom settings So I would try to come up with a setting that is as similar as a setting where people usually answer questionnaires Replication weak medium This study did not replicate the study so the external validity would have been stronger if they replicated the study with different people and at different times and in a various settings or places

With regard to this effect the authors have mentioned about assessing the effectiveness of the video based intervention with other types of gun users in other settings III Overall critique Although the ideas methods and objectives of the post test only control group study design were clear and ingenious there could be improvements made in developing rigorous research methods so that follow up studies with more rigorous study design could be implemented As any other research studies has to deal with if more time and financial resources were allowed this study could have collected more participants at different times and in various places to increase the external validity Because the study design was observational with a similar ratio between cases and controls the results of this study cannot be generalized or applied to other groups or the general population Despite some of these limitation this type of study can take less time to conduct be relatively inexpensive and easy to conduct with a small number of researchers With respect to contribution to the gun safety research studies field the results of this study could be used as a preliminary study where little is known about the association between the video based intervention and behavioral intent related to gun safety practices


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