Discussion Responses

Write a response to each discussion.

Evans 4.1

This article was about the effects of alcoholism in adults on adolescent children. It goes into detail about how the adolescent stages of life are hard enough with the hormone changes and exploration phase. When a child has a parent that suffers from alcoholism it may cause conflict and interruption of a "normal" family dynamic. (Chetana,Shanu,Mangliana, 2016)One threat to internal validity would be what is considered adolescent. There was not a specific age range listed in the study. The way the article is written, the reader is unsure if the phrase adolescents is referring to 12-17 year or a different age range. The author assumed that everyone would define adolescents the same way.A threat on external validity would be consistency. There were a lot of factors that I feel could alter the results of this study. Because age is not mention, the participants are just listed as adolescents, it leaves one to wonder does alcoholism have the same effect on a twelve-year-old as a seventeen year old? Some of the results showed that the parent had one to two drinks a day where as other participants had 7-10 drinks per day. I would be interested to know what were the ages of the parents and children. Chetana, S.E. Shanu, Mangliana,(2016). Parental Alcoholism and Psychosocial Problems of Adolescents Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32(5), 995-1002

Parker 4.1

The experimental study I chose for this assignment hypothesized that mindfulness based stress reduction and relaxation training would significantly decrease stress and anxiety in anticipation of lowering cardiac events in women. The current research strongly suggests that suppression of negative emotions relates to heart disease. The lowered variability of heart rates eludes to the development of atherosclerosis and endothelial dysfunction (Tacon, McComb, Caldera, Randolph, 2003). This study utilized a control group and a treatment group. The study was small with only 9 participants in each group.

Two internal validity issue with this study could be a pre-existing, unknown heart condition or anomaly that would affect the outcome. I did not note either of those issues with this study. While mindfulness is an effective coping mechanism for reducing anxiety and ultimately reducing heart related illness, the existance of a physiological condition would hinder or make ineffective the efforts of the training.

Two external validity issues one could be aware of with this study could be the size of the sample; I cannot place faith in a sample size of 18 or the age factor noted at the end of the research. Both of these factors affect the generalization of the research. I would be very interested in exploring this study on a large scale sample.

I feel that both internal and external validity are crucial, however I feel strongly that internal validity is extremely important because this is where the answer is discovered and the basis of research.