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IB DP Psychology — Concepts | SL & HL | Paper 3
Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define credibility, reflexivity, and reliability using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how credibility is established in qualitative research and why it matters for evaluating psychological findings.
- Explain how reflexivity operates as a tool for managing researcher bias in qualitative inquiry.
- Distinguish between reliability in quantitative research and trustworthiness in qualitative research, and explain why this distinction is important.
- Evaluate research evidence related to credibility, reflexivity, and reliability using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply these concepts to a realistic case study from a research methods perspective.
- Analyse methodological decisions using relevant concept areas: Bias, Measurement, Perspective, and Responsibility.
Introduction & Context
Imagine you are reading a study that claims to explain why teenagers feel anxious about social media. The researchers interviewed fifteen adolescents, analysed their responses, and drew sweeping conclusions about the causes of anxiety. Before you accept those conclusions, a series of questions should naturally arise: How do we know the participants were being honest? How do we know the researcher's own opinions didn't shape what they found? And if someone else ran the same study, would they get the same results? These are not trivial questions — they sit at the very heart of what makes psychological research worth trusting.
In quantitative research, these concerns are addressed through statistical tools, replication, and controlled design. But qualitative research — interviews, observations, thematic analysis — operates differently. It produces rich, contextual data that cannot simply be replicated in the same way a laboratory experiment can. This creates a genuine methodological challenge: how do we evaluate whether qualitative findings are trustworthy? The concepts of credibility, reflexivity, and reliability are the tools psychologists use to answer that question.
🔍 Analogy — The Journalist's Notebook Think of a journalist investigating a story. A good journalist doesn't just print the first account they hear — they cross-check sources, acknowledge their own potential biases, and ask whether another journalist following the same leads would reach the same conclusions. Credibility is like cross-checking sources. Reflexivity is like acknowledging your own perspective. Reliability is like asking whether the story would hold up if someone else investigated it. Together, these practices are what separate trustworthy reporting from opinion dressed up as fact — and the same logic applies to psychological research.
Core Concepts
When we ask whether a piece of research is trustworthy, the first and most fundamental question is whether the findings actually reflect the reality of the participants' experiences. A researcher might conduct dozens of interviews and produce a beautifully written analysis — but if the conclusions don't genuinely represent what participants meant, the entire study is built on a false foundation. This quality — the degree to which findings accurately represent the phenomenon being studied — is what psychologists call credibility.
📖 Key Definition — Credibility Credibility refers to the confidence that can be placed in the truth of