Question

What are the benefits of studying daily behavior through use of electronically activated recorder and is that research appear to have ecological validity

Answer 1

The psychologists’ generally depend on de-contextualized behavioral responses of respondents in laboratory or on global self-report instruments to determine the cause effect relationship of behavior with stimulating events. At times this limits the ecological validity of inferences about social processes and personality variations among individuals. To deal with these methodological issues, psychologists have now come up with ingenious ways of recording the daily lives of volunteers through EAR- Electronically Activated Recorder.

This EAR is generally a microphone that helps in recording the interactions people have in their daily lives. The result is that it gives a first-hand unadulterated account of the interactions between the person and the environment. Therefore, in order to establish, human behavior that apply across populations and environments, real life field experiments are required. The results of such experiments are at times lack ecological validity, but still they give a lot of insight about what type of causal relationship exists between person’s behavior and the stimuli. This also helps in theory building and testing. A number of researchers like, Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi (2007) have done studies using EAR. They have gathered first hand, in the moment data, from people’s daily lives.

Overall, it may be said that this usage of EAR is a dependable aid for gathering data from the daily lives of people.