Barnes-Holmes, D., Waldron, D., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & Stewart, I. (2009). Testing the validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) and the Implicit Association Test (IAT): Measuring attitudes towards Dublin and country life in Ireland. The Psychological Record, 59, 389-406.
The current study aimed to test the validity of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), as compared to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), by assessing the attitudes of Dublin- and rural-dwellers to Dublin (the capital city of Ireland) and country life. Feeling thermometers and Likert scales were employed to obtain explicit ratings of life in Dublin versus the country. The IAT and IRAP tasks involved responding under time pressure on a computerized task, with response latency as the dependent variable. The IAT required participants to categorize positively or negatively valenced words with stimuli associated with either Dublin Life or Country Life. The IRAP required that participants confirm or deny that Dublin and Country life are similar or opposite to positively and negatively valenced words. Discrimination between the two groups for the IAT was marginally significant. The IRAP discriminated significantly between the two groups based on an interaction effect, which showed that rural-dwellers had a strong bias toward Country Life but Dublin-dwellers did not show the same bias toward Dublin Life. The IRAP data correlated moderately with the explicit measures, but the IAT did not. The findings support the IRAP as a potentially useful measure of implicit attitudes.