An occupational therapist student is researching how workspace organization affects cognitive fatigue. They design two workstations:
The student researcher decides themselves, based on their own subjective impressions of comfort and modern design, which equipment layouts belong to each classification.
Participants perform a series of attention tasks at each workstation for two hours, after which their fatigue is measured using a self-report scale (1–50). The researcher plans to use a Wilcoxon signed-ranks test to compare the fatigue levels between the two layouts.
The student researcher decided themselves which workstation layouts were 'ergonomically optimized' and which were 'ergonomically poor'.
Explain how the study could be improved by selecting or categorising the workstations another way.
689 exam-style questions on AQA A Level Psychology Scientific processes. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.