Question

How “socially desirable response” constitutes a threat for psychological measurement? Provide an example.

In scientific research, why are certain variables called confounds? Provide an example.

Answer 1

1) Socially desirable responses are responses of the participants in experiments/tests which are viewed favourably by the experimenter. The participant will try to respond in a manner that might not be genuine or promote the idea of construct to be helpful and due to social desirability. This might affect the psychological measurement because it compromises the validity of the study/ construct/ scale. It will be difficult for the study to be generalised if that happens. For example, a researcher wants to construct a scale on "prosocial behaviour" which measures the helping nature of human of different cultures. Now while testing the validity of the scale, the participants might answer the questions dishonestly to make themselves look good and be socially desirable. Say, in questions which involves rating their helping nature towards the poor, they might rate themselves highly.

2) Confounding variables are those variables which are called "extra variables". This simply means that they are not required in the study but they affect the dependent variable. These variables are called confounds because they might affect the study and interfere with the actual results. For example, if a researcher wants to find out the effect of hours of studying on academic performance of students. Now, the results might show that students who studied for more hours scored better, but there can be confounding variables here which might be the reason to influence academic scores like hours of sleep before exam.