Internal Validity
Throughout this research, a few limiting factors were encountered. The survey received a total 106 participants which yielded 85 usable responses. Since mainly personal means were used to recruit participants, like word of mouth and social media channels (Instagram and LinkedIn), there was always a risk of some responses being unusable due to student status or age. While this may have been a limitation in terms of gaining large amounts of usable responses, it actually strengthened the internal validity of the survey data. The survey was not posted to outside sites, such as Reddit, where trolling answers would need to be considered as a possible hindrance. The results of this survey can be considered trustworthy as no one who participated had any reason or motivation to be dishonest within their answers.
External Validity
One factor could have impacts on both internal and external validity: all 85 viable respondents answered every question except the final open-ended one. This question received only 43 responses, meaning that only about half of the participant pool provided an answer. This impeded internal validity as the workings of the survey allowed participants to finish the survey without answering every question. In terms of external validity, future studies’ researchers should ensure the workings of their surveys allow none of the questions to be skipped. Besides this limitation, external validity was really only affected by two other factors. The vast majority of respondents to this survey ended up being women (n=60) and only 29.4% (n=25) of the participants were men. Additionally, 90.6% (n=77) identified themselves as White. These two factors could hold back the generalizability of the findings as not a wide enough demographic variety was surveyed.