You read an article stating that Facebook is related to unhappiness. In the stud

Question

You read an article stating that Facebook is related to unhappiness. In the study, a group of high school students were asked how many times a day they checked their Facebook pages and how happy they were. In discussing this article with your friend Matt, he exclaims, “I knew it! I have always said that being on Facebook is the cause of all my unhappiness!” Using criteria for evaluating causal claims, discuss the reasons your friend Matt is correct or incorrect in his interpretation of the study.

Explanation / Answer

The causal claim by Matt is that "being on Facebook causes him unhappiness" . He is incorrect in his interpretation of the study. This is explained by these criteria's of evaluation causal claims:

In order to be a causal claim to be valid, you have to be able to show that your cause happened before your effect. But in this case, his unhappiness may have come before his use of Facebook, which violates temporal precedence.And infact, the situation maybe that Matt uses Facebook when he is unhappy, so these both processes may cause and, in turn, be affected by the other. Which makes it very hard to establish a causal relationship.

It also violates the internal validity, since there could be many reasons why he is unhappy, not just because of Facebook. Since, just because he is able to observe a relationship between both, doesn't mean it's a causal one. It is quite possible that there is another variable that is causing the unhappiness and logging to facebook as well.

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