A developmental psychologist is planning an observational study to investigate prosocial behaviour in primary school children during breaktime. Before embarking on the main study, she conducts a pilot study where two independent observers use a draft tally sheet to record occurrences of "cooperative play" from a short video recording of children.
Which of the following is the primary reason for conducting this pilot procedure?
To establish the concurrent validity of the prosocial behavioral categories.
To check the reliability of the coding system and the level of agreement between observers.
To eliminate investigator effects by ensuring a double-blind procedure is maintained.
To determine whether a directional (one-tailed) hypothesis is appropriate for the main study.
