attrition

n. the loss of study participants over time. Attrition may occur for a variety of reasons (e.g., the nature of the data being collected, participant relocation, aversive or costly data collection procedures) and can threaten the external validity and internal validity of research. It also creates the potential for bias—individuals who drop out may have unique characteristics that are relevant to the phenomenon of interest such that the remaining sample is no longer representative of the population—and may reduce the power of statistical analyses.

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Psychology term of the day

November 22nd 2024

agreement

n. in linguistics, the correct relation between the different grammatical elements of a sentence, so that, for example, the number of the verb corresponds to that of its subject, and the number and gender of a pronoun correspond to those of its noun.