Then, after reading the article, consider the following:

Link to Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861779/

Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Holleran, S. E., & Clark, C. S. (2010). Eavesdropping on happiness: Well-being is related to having less small talk and more substantive conversations. Psychological Science, 21, 539-541. doi:10.1177/0956797610362675

1. Is the basic approach in this study qualitative or quantitative?

2. Is this study an example of concealed or nonconcealed observation? What are the ethical issues present in this study?

3. Do you think that participants would be reactive to this data collection method?

4. How reliable were the coders? How did the authors assess their reliability?

5. How did the researchers operationally define small talk, substantive talk, well-being, and happiness? What do you think about the quality of these operational definitions?

6. Does this study suffer from the problem involving the direction of causation? How so?

7. Does this study suffer from the third-variable problem? How so?

8. Do you think that this study included any confounding variables? Provide examples.

9. Given the topic of this study, what other ways can you think of to conduct this study using an observational method?