For the following research situation, identify the independent and dependent var

Question

For the following research situation, identify the independent and dependent variables. Classify each in terms of level of measurement and whether or not the variable is discrete or continuous. Use the table below as your guide to complete the table in Word or Excel and upload your answer/table. *Note: you will be able to fill in the entire table!

A graduate student is studying sexual harassment on college campuses and asks 500 female students if they personally have experienced any such incidents. Each student is asked to estimate the frequency of these incidents as either “often, sometimes, rarely or never.” The research also gathers data on age and major to see if there is any connection between these variables and frequency of sexual harassment.

For dependent I have frequency of sexual harrasment, ordinal, and continuous. And for independent variable I have age, interval-ratio, discrete and major, nominal, discrete. Are these correct and also I need to come up with one more variable.

Explanation / Answer

In A, one of the variables is number of incidents of sexual harassment. That variable is actually numeric, even though the researcher asks participants to categorize it into broad categories. It is not clear whether one participant's "sometimes" might be a smaller number than another's "rarely."

Age is also numeric, but major is not. The number of incidents will be an integer, but the use of categories sort of obscures that. Age in the sense that we normally use it is discrete, because we say we are X (meaning X years), not X years, Y months, Z days, A hours ... You can argue that age is continuous because we are older today than yesterday even if we answer the same when asked our age. I'd argue that major is discrete, even though some people double major.

Is the researcher trying to figure out whether the number of incidents of harassment depend on age, or whether age depends on the number of incidents of harassment? That will tell you which is dependent and which is independent. (It is possible that there is no relation.) Similarly, does the researcher try to determine whether the incidence of harassment might depend on the major, or whether then choice of major depends on the incidence of harassment?

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