Working through technological and methodological challenges in a virtual-reality study on police decisions to use lethal force /
This methods case study provides a behind-the-scenes description of a research project in which participants made lethal force decisions while viewing 360-degree videos of police-suspect encounters through a virtual reality headset, while their physiological stress and visual attention was monitored...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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London :
SAGE Publications Ltd,
2024.
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| Series: | SAGE Research methods: diversifying and decolonizing research.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This methods case study provides a behind-the-scenes description of a research project in which participants made lethal force decisions while viewing 360-degree videos of police-suspect encounters through a virtual reality headset, while their physiological stress and visual attention was monitored. The results of this project culminated in two papers that focused on how physiological stress and visual attention interact to impact lethal force decision-making with Black suspects. During the development of the project, I faced both expected and unexpected challenges. For example, heading into the project I knew that there was no previously established method for determining visual attention patterns from 360-degree video stimuli, and that this would need to be developed specifically for this project. Unexpectedly, I faced some challenges with experimental control; specifically, although I attempted to film two versions of each police-suspect scenario in which everything was identical except the race of the suspect, you will read below that this was not successful. As a result, I focused my analyses only on scenarios with Black suspects, limiting the strength of our results. These challenges, however, have served as catalysts for my current directions in this line of research. Through the narrative of this project and its challenges, readers will learn about a variety of concepts and developments that are particularly pertinent to psychological research, including understanding the potential value of virtual reality for research, the difference between behavioral and self-report research, challenges of operationalizing variables within behavioral research, and tensions between ecological validity and experimental control. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations. |
| ISBN: | 9781529689358 152968935X |