You Conducted a Laboratory Experiment Investigating the Effects of a Perspective

Essay

You conducted a laboratory experiment investigating the effects of a perspective taking intervention on participants' attitudes toward outgroup members (e.g., if participants were Democrats, outgroup members would be Republicans). You created a new measure of prejudice because you could not find a previous validated prejudice scale. Your results indicated that at Time 1, prejudice scores were similar for the treatment and control groups, while at Time 2, prejudice scores were slightly, but significantly, lower in the control group, rather than in the treatment group. How could that be - could there be something wrong with the way you measured prejudice? Specifically, how might our knowledge of measurement validity explain these results? Discuss the different aspects of measurement validity and how they could have impacted your results.