It is always a good idea to conduct a pilot test of your experiment. A pilot test is a small-scale study conducted to make sure that a new procedure works as planned. In a pilot test, you can recruit participants formally (e.g., from an established participant pool) or you can recruit them informally from among family, friends, classmates, and so on. The number of participants can be small, but it should be enough to give you confidence that your procedure works as planned. There are several important questions that you can answer by conducting a pilot test:
- Do participants understand the instructions?
- What kind of misunderstandings do participants have, what kind of mistakes do they make, and what kind of questions do they ask?
- Do participants become bored or frustrated?
- Is an indirect manipulation effective? (You will need to include a manipulation check.)
- Can participants guess the research question or hypothesis?
- How long does the procedure take?
- Are computer programs or other automated procedures working properly?
- Are data being recorded correctly?
Of course, to answer some of these questions you will need to observe participants carefully during the procedure and talk with them about it afterward. Participants are often hesitant to criticize a study in front of the researcher, so be sure they understand that this is a pilot test and you are genuinely interested in feedback that will help you improve the procedure. If the procedure works as planned, then you can proceed with the actual study. If there are problems to be solved, you can solve them, pilot test the new procedure, and continue with this process until you are ready to proceed.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- There are several effective methods you can use to recruit research participants for your experiment, including through formal subject pools, advertisements, and personal appeals. Field experiments require well-defined participant selection procedures.
- It is important to standardize experimental procedures to minimize extraneous variables, including experimenter expectancy effects.
- It is important to conduct one or more small-scale pilot tests of an experiment to be sure that the procedure works as planned.
EXERCISES
- Practice: List two ways that you might recruit participants from each of the following populations: (a) elderly adults, (b) unemployed people, (c) regular exercisers, and (d) math majors.
- Discussion: Imagine a study in which you will visually present participants with a list of 20 words, one at a time, wait for a short time, and then ask them to recall as many of the words as they can. In the stressed condition, they are told that they might also be chosen to give a short speech in front of a small audience. In the unstressed condition, they are not told that they might have to give a speech. What are several specific things that you could do to standardize the procedure?
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