Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Avoiding Researchers Bias to Protect Internal Validity

11 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief instructional video, the speaker explains how researcher bias can compromise internal validity, especially when designing participant incentives. He notes that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) will question whether respondents will be paid, and that overly generous rewards (e.g., a new car) can bias participants to give the answers the researcher expects. The speaker argues that the desire to obtain predetermined results should be avoided from the outset, and that the study’s problem and purpose statements must be written without assuming known outcomes. By keeping design decisions free of such bias, researchers preserve internal validity. The video ends with a call to comment the word “help” to receive a link to a free dissertation help community.

Chapters

When you design a study you're going to go through your IRB and they're going to ask you are you going to pay respondents and if you say yes I'm going to give everybody a new car. That's kind of biasing results. If they know hey if I give you the answers you want you get a new car, that's no. They want your reward to be such that it doesn't influence the results that you get and that's going to throw off your validity and this part of researcher bias trying to get the results you want is part of your design should go all the way back to your problem and purpose statements where if you're starting to say ultimately I know what the results are and this is what should be done well then you've got bias and you want to keep that bias out of your design so you will continue to have internal validity. Drop the word help in the comments and I'll send you a link to my free dissertation help community.