OCR AS Psychology: Core Studies - Griffiths (5)

Procedure (cont):

DV2: Irrational verbalisations:To measure the participants irrational verbalisations, Griffiths devised the ‘thinking aloud’ technique. The regular and non-regular fruit machine gamblers were randomly assigned to either the ‘thinking aloud’ condition or ‘non-thinking aloud’ condition.The participants assigned to the thinking aloud condition had their verbalisations recorded using a lapel microphone connected to a portable tape recorder. The experimenter transcribed all of the verbalisations made during the gambling session within 24 hours so that he could remember the context of the verbalisations.A content analysis was performed on the transcriptions. Based on the utterances Griffiths created a coding scheme with 30 irrational and irrational utterances and a further miscellaneous category.

Examples of irrational verbalisations: Personofication of the machine e.g. 'The machine likes me'; Swearing at the machine e.g 'you *******'. Examples of rational verbalisations: Swearing/Cursing e.g. '****, Damn, etc'; Reference to losing e.g. 'I lost the whole pound there'.

A post experimental semi-structured interview was also carried out to measure the participants’ subjective opinions of their skill levels. A number of questions relating to skill were asked. For example participants were asked “Is there any skill involved in playing a fruit machine? And “How skilful do you think you are compared with the average player?” What skill (if any) is involved in playing fruit machines?