A psychologist wanted to investigate whether a pre-bedtime mindfulness meditation app would affect morning alertness levels in university students. Previous research into the effects of mindfulness on sleep quality and alertness in young adults had shown that mindfulness practices increased morning alertness.
The psychologist decided to use a repeated measures design to investigate the effects of the mindfulness app on morning alertness levels in 25 undergraduate students. All the students were currently attending full-time morning lectures.
For Condition A, students were required to complete a 15-minute guided mindfulness meditation on an app immediately before going to sleep each night for one week.
In Condition B, students continued their standard pre-sleep routine (e.g., scrolling through social media) immediately before going to sleep each night for one week.
At the end of each week of the investigation, for both Condition A and Condition B, each student was asked to rate their morning alertness levels on a self-report rating scale of 1–10, where 1 indicated extremely sluggish and 10 indicated exceptionally alert.
Students self-reported their morning alertness levels on a scale of 1–10.
Explain how this might have affected the validity of the data collected.
Practise AQA A Level Psychology Scientific processes with exam-style questions for A Level Psychology. 689 questions, matched to the AQA A Level Psychology (7182) specification and written in Paper 1, Paper 2 and Paper 3 style. Every question includes a full worked solution and mark scheme, so you can see where marks are awarded rather than just whether you got the answer right.
