To examine the effectiveness of empathy training on children's sharing behaviour, two months of training are provided to 3-year-old children living in rural Manitoba. Six months later, the children's sharing behaviours are measured and compared to their pretraining sharing behaviour. Improvements are considered the result of the empathy training. Which factor is a potential source of internal invalidity?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The potential source of internal invalidity is the passage of time between the empathy training and the measurement of sharing behaviour. It is possible that children's sharing behaviour could improve without any intervention simply as a result of maturation or experience. Therefore, it is important to have a control group to account for this potential confounding variable. The other factors listed are not necessarily sources of internal invalidity in this particular study.

To Examine the Effectiveness of Empathy Training on Children's Sharing