Response of participants who are well aware of the fact that they are being…
2024
Response of participants who are well aware of the fact that they are being studied is considered
Answer: D. Reactive effect — ConceptMeasurement in the human sciences is not a neutral act. Once people know that their behaviour is the object of study, that awareness itself becomes an…
- A.
Directed response
- B.
Intentional response
- C.
Desire effect
- D.
Reactive effect
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept
Measurement in the human sciences is not a neutral act. Once people know that their behaviour is the object of study, that awareness itself becomes an influence on how they behave, over and above whatever the researcher intended to manipulate. The general name for this tendency is reactivity: the property of a person, group or process to change simply because it is being measured. A response produced by that awareness is called a reactive effect.
Applying it to this item
The stem fixes one specific condition on the participants: they are well aware that they are being studied. The awareness is stipulated, so the situation of observation is itself active.
Their behaviour therefore has two sources — the treatment or setting under investigation, and their knowledge of being observed. The second source is precisely what reactivity names.
A response classified this way is labelled a reactive effect, because the participant is reacting to the act of measurement rather than only to the variable being studied.
The effect takes its name from the Hawthorne studies at the Western Electric works in Illinois (1924-1932), where worker output rose across successive and even opposing changes in lighting. The original investigators read that rise as a response to the attention the workers were receiving, and the label "Hawthorne effect" has been attached to reactivity ever since. Later reanalyses of the plant records dispute how much of that particular rise the attention actually explains, so treat the Hawthorne studies as the historical namesake and a specific case of reactivity rather than as a proof of it.
Because the extra influence comes from the research arrangement and not from the phenomenon under study, reactivity is treated as a threat to validity: what is measured in the study cannot be read straight off as what happens outside it. Blind or double-blind procedures, unobtrusive measurement and longer familiarisation periods are the standard countermeasures.
Distinguishing the labels
Label | Where it locates the cause |
|---|---|
Directed response | In how the question was put: the wording, ordering or framing supplied by the investigator steers what the participant says. A property of the instrument, not of the participant’s awareness. |
Intentional response | In the participant’s own purpose: an answer deliberately chosen to project a preferred image or serve a private aim. A motive, not the observation situation that surrounds it. |
Desire effect | In what somebody hopes to see. The wish-driven bias that research methodology does name is experimenter expectancy, and that one sits with the investigator’s hopes, not with the participant’s knowledge of being watched. |
Reactive effect | In the measurement situation itself: the participant’s knowledge of being observed feeds into the behaviour that gets recorded. This is the condition the stem stipulates. |
Result
The response of participants who know they are being studied is classified as a reactive effect — the behavioural expression of reactivity.