The following is from one of the discussions on the reading the research module. I thought it was good because the writer covered several different aspects of the testing situation and presented feasible reasons about why we might question the validity of the procedure. Also, a very good point was brought up about the influence of media on the teenager's choice of the "most attractive person's" age. This would negate the argument that mate preference is due to evolutionary/biological influences.(sorry for the spacing problems)

Ironically, a factor that I thought was not considered in this study was the age of the participants involved, in that kids are greatly affected by older people. That is, to have an experimeter present in the room (assuming the experimenter is an older male/female) may invalidate the results since they might feel awkward and answer the way an experimenter would expect them to answer. Also, I question the idea that having a same-sex experimenter would some how eliminate any pressure and/or biasness in the results. In fact, I think that having opposite-sex experimenters would have just the same effect (or there lack of) as the same-sex experimenters,since there is no reason to believe otherwise. For
example, if the student had a low self esteem, his answer to the questionnaire, depending on whether it was a male or female, could vary,since he may feel that he would have to lie in order to fit the "mold" of what an average teenager should answer. I thought that both of these problems could have easily been remedied if the questionnaire was given by a computer, or even on a piece of paper. This way, there would be no outside influence on the student. Another problem that I found was that the method of limits (where the experimenter asks a question and decreases/increases the number
of whatever he/she's testing in increments of a certain number, until a maximum/minimum is reached) may be accurate, but it may also create errors in anticipation. As Mr von Osten found
out the hard way about his "Clever" hans, the Experimenter may give off suttle, yet unnoticable
hints of what he/she expects the answer to be. If the experimenter were to have no knowledge as to why the questinnaire was being given, then that might eliminate this problem.Its interesting to note that this study was only meant to test heterosexual males and females. However, I would think that students in those age groups might not be very open about their sexual preferances if they were homosexual. However, this constant error could also be found in experiments involving older people, so I don't think that it would have a particular effect on the outcome of the results (also, statistically, the percentage of homosexuals to heterosexuals is so small, that in a sufficient smaple size, it would probably not have an affect).However, in spite of all these problems, I still belive that the idea behind the study is still valid,as are the theories that could be derived from the results. However, i still think that the restults could have been more accurate. Furthermore, I would have to belive that for the "most attractive partners" question, media mighthave an effect. COnsidering the fact that most "attractive" people found in magazines
(including teen magazines such as YM) and television are aged on average, well above 15 years of age (anything less might hinge on Pedophelia), might be an explanation to the results.This wouldn't be a problem for studies that included the ages 20+ years, since media focuses mainly on ages similar to them anyways.