A researcher examined whether college students were better at remembering certai

Question

A researcher examined whether college students were better at remembering certain categories of words than others. All participants were shown 12 words and were then asked to write down as many as they could recall. The researcher randomly assigned participants to one of 3 conditions: 25 participants were shown words that were professions (e.g. waiter, secretary); 25 different participants were shown words that were foods (e.g. apple, broccoli); and a third group of 25 participants were shown words that were animals (e.g. dog, zebra).

1. What is the control variable that the researcher should have in this study?

2. Is this a between-groups or within-groups design? Explain.

3. Students will vary in how good their memories are. What kind of variable is this? Explain.

4. All of the students were from the same university. What kind of validity does this limit? Explain.

5. The “profession” group was tested in the morning, the “food” group at lunchtime, and the “animal” group in the evening. What kind of variable is this? Explain.

Explanation / Answer

1. The researcher must use a matching variable to create random groups with almost equal representation of sample.

2. This is a between group design as three different set of respondents are there in three experimental conditions. Between group design is an experimental design where there are different set of respondents for each treatment conditions.

3.Memory of the subjects will be an extraneous variable. Had the groups been matched with the equal representation of respondents with good and poor memories, in each condition, this extraneous variable must have been controlled.

4. The results cannot be generalized as all the respondents belonged to single university. This limits the external validity of the results. External validity indicates how much the results can be generalized to the whole population.

5. The timing of the experimental conditions is again an extraneous variable. This is also a threat to internal as well as external validity of the results. There are different types of people- some are owls and some are larks, therefore, the best performance an individual can give is also dependent on the type of circadian rhythm one has. The results may thus be confounded by the timing of conduction of experiment.

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