Langer and Rodin Methodology

A strength of Langer and Rodin's study was its design. It was conducted in a real nursing home with real residents. The things that were said to the residents in each condition were realistic. Both the setting and the intervention were natural, and so the ecological validity of the study can be said to be good. This is particularly important in a study like this one because it was aiming to test whether ideas that seemed to work in the laboratory would actually work in a real-life setting. 

Often when experiments are carried out in natural settings and ecological validity is high, there is low experimental control. In this study, however, there was good experimental control because of the similarity of the two floors on which the study was conducted. Care was taken to see that the only variables differing between the two conditions were choice and responsibility. This is why both groups were given a similar talk by the same person. The procedure could easily be replicated elsewhere, therefore, both internal and external reliability are good.

A range of measures of outcome was used, including questionnaires and ratings by nurses. A problem in some studies involving ratings by observers is bias. This takes place because the observers know what the study is testing and what they expect to find. However, in this study the nurses who rated patients for alertness and…