Dealing With Demand Characteristics
Researchers use a number of different approaches for dealing with demand characteristics in research situations. Some of the more common approaches include the following:
- Deception: Deceive participants about one or more aspects of the research in order to conceal the research hypothesis.
- Post-experimental questionnaires. For example, Rubin, Paolini and Crisp (2010) have developed a Perceived Awareness of the Research Hypothesis (PARH) scale. This 4-item scale is usually presented at the end of a research session. In responding to the scale, participants indicate the extent to which they believe that they are aware of the researchers' hypotheses during the research. Researchers then compute a mean PARH score and correlate this with their key effects. Significant correlations indicate that demand characteristics may be related to the research results. Nonsignificant correlations provide tentative evidence against the demand characteristics explanation.
- Unobtrusive manipulations and measures: Conceal independent and dependent measures so that they do not provide clues about the research hypothesis.
- Do not inform the person who has contact with the participants about the research hypotheses: Reduces the experimenter expectancy effect.
- Minimize interpersonal contact between the researcher and the participant: Reduces experimenter expectancy effect.
- Use a between-subjects design rather than a within-subjects design (e.g., Rubin & Badea, 2010, p. 411).
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