Your assignment is to design a small-group laboratory experiment that would test

Question

Your assignment is to design a small-group laboratory experiment that would test the following hypothesis using the classical design:

Men who work with women who appear clearly more effective than themselves in finding a solution to a problem-solving task will have a higher regard for women than men who work in a group without women on the same task.

Note: This experiment involves only men as subjects. The women are simply confederates and are not part of the basic design. Also, be sure to devise a laboratory experiment.

Let’s say we have a group of women who are interested in science. The study we would make is to have them create a digital circuit. They would have to create and put together all the parts by themselves and test their circuit for different factors pertaining to the circuits. However, none of the women have any previous experience with this. However, a demo would be given on how to create the circuits and solve it. I would create a survey or questions and give it to the group. We would have to make sure that there would be questions for both the experimental group as well as the women that are confederates. Then we could perform a statistical analysis and test our hypothesis which would be that there is a significant difference that women are more effective than men in problem solving.

1.Describe how you would make sure that the confederate women in the experimental group would be clearly more effective in solving the problem than the men.

2.Describe the means by which you would test the attitudes of men regarding women’s analytical abilities after the problem-solving exercises (posttest of attitudes).

3.Describe two potential sources of internal invalidity that your design reduces or avoids. Explain why or how your design does this.

4.Describe one potential course of external invalidity that your design reduces or avoids. Explain why or how your design does this. Remember, external invalidity reflects the generalizability of your results.

Explanation / Answer

Answer to question # 1)

The best way to ensure that the women are more effective is to include the women who have already worked on this task before , and have a better hands on. They must be more experienced. Like this it would sure that when they work with men , they are more effective in handling the task and solving the problems

.

Answer to question# 2)

we can evaluate the attitude of men by a one on one interview of each one of them , the interview would contain a few predesigned questions , that help us rate their attitude towards their women co-workers. A one on one interview will ensure knowing the correct picture and it would be independent of the attitude of the other men

.

Answer to question # 3)

The first source of interna; validity can be obtained by rating the attitude of men before the task and then after the task . This will asure us that the task created the difference and the experiment or the change in attitude is attributed to the task alone or the experiemnt alone

The second source of internal validility is to ensure that no other variable causes or influences the environment , in order to do so the experiment or task must be done in some preset experimental lab

.

Answer to question# 4)

In order to consider the external validity aspect of the research , we need to make sure that the sample tends to represent the population completley , for that what can be done is to make the sample more diverse in terms of age, years of experience and people of different designations must eb incorporated in the sample . In this manner the research results would be validated externally as well , and then the results can be easily generalised as well.

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