10.5: Dealing with offending behaviour

Question 1

To investigate the effectiveness of a behaviour modification programme, psychologists observed the behaviour of prisoners at meal times which they had noted was a particularly difficult time and a time when there was a higher than average number of violent incidents. They used behavioural categories to assess the number of aggressive acts both before and after the programme had been used.
How could the psychologists test the data for reliability and what steps could be taken to ensure the data was as reliable as possible? (3 marks)

Answer 1

The data could be tested for inter-observer reliability, where different observers should make consistent observations of prisoners’ behaviour at mealtimes before and after the behaviour modification programme was administered

Question 2

To investigate the effectiveness of a behaviour modification programme, psychologists observed the behaviour of prisoners at meal times which they had noted was a particularly difficult time and a time when there was a higher than average number of violent incidents. They used behavioural categories to assess the number of aggressive acts both before and after the programme had been used.
How could the psychologists test the data for reliability and what steps could be taken to ensure the data was as reliable as possible? (3 marks).
The data could be tested for inter-observer reliability, where different observers should make consistent observations of prisoners’ behaviour at mealtimes before and after the behaviour modification programme was administered.

Answer 2

To ensure the data had inter-observer reliability, clear behavioural categories of observation should be drawn up before the research occurs, with care taken to ensure that categories are separate from each other with no overlap of behaviours