THE VALIDITY OF COMMUNICATION EXPERIMENTS USING HUMAN SUBJECTS: A REVIEW

Sixty-eight experiments published in 1973 and 1974 in the Journal of Communication, Speech Monographs, and Human Communication Research were analyzed. It was concluded that: reports of communication experimentation rarely provide sufficient information to allow critical evaluation of crucial aspects of validity: the validity of communication experimentation may be severely limited by the nature of subjects studied and by failures to eliminate, account for, or acknowledge experimental reactivity.