As a way of giving you practice with designing experiments, design an appropriate experiment to evaluate ONE of the following research situations. Present your responses labeled with the corresponding numbers below.
Thursday, articles evaluating this material will become available to you and you will be able to answer item 7, due by Sunday
Detailed instructions :
Do the following for the scenario (below) you selected. Your response may be bulletted for each response below, but make sure to write in complete sentences when appropriate:
– Write an alternative and null hypothesis. H1 and Ho .
– Identify the most appropriate experimental design (e.g., single-factor or factorial) and explain how exactly it qualifies as that type of design.
– Specify precisely what the independent variable(s) will be, and how they will be manipulated. Also, specify the number of levels of each independent variable if appropriate.
– Specify exactly what the dependent variable(s) will be, and the operational definition for the variable as well as how it will be quantified.
– Specify the procedures that will be followed (e.g., how participants will be obtained, where the experiment will be run, what exactly will take place).This should be detailed enough to clearly illustrate what the manipulation is in the experiment and exactly how the experiment would work.
– Indicate what, if anything, would be done to control extraneous variables and eliminate confounding variables.
– Indicate if the experiment could be run as a within-subjects or matched-groups design. If so, what would the matching variables be and why? For within-subjects designs, indicate what you would do to address the problems of carryover effects, participant fatigue, habituation, etc.
SCENARIOS
A. You are interested in investigating the relationship between altruism and empathy. Specifically, you want to know whether focusing on the feelings of a person in need will lead to greater feelings of empathy and more willingness to help than focusing on that person’s thoughts.
B. The Internet has become an outlet not just for information but for social relationships as well. It is well known that being ostracized from a group has negative consequences for a person. Imagine that you are interested in studying whether the manner in which a person is treated during a social interaction on the Internet affects his or her mood or self-esteem. You design an experiment to test the idea that individuals who are ostracized in an Internet social interaction will show poorer mood and lower self-esteem than those who are accepted.
C. You are interested in whether changing the format of a lineup will affect the accuracy of eyewitness identification in children and adults. Specifically, you want to know if individuals perform differently on three types of lineups: a standard simultaneous lineup (the witness views all individuals in the lineup at the same time and is asked whether he or she recognizes anyone), a fast elimination lineup (the witness is told to look at the lineup and pick out the person who looks most like the suspect), and a slow elimination lineup (the witness is told to eliminate individuals from the lineup who do not look like the suspect). You are interested in the rates of correct identifications (correctly identifying the suspect), false alarms (saying the suspect is in the lineup when he or she is not), misses (saying the suspect is not in the lineup when he or she is), and correct rejections (correctly saying that the suspect is not present in the lineup).
References
Bordens, K. S. & Abbot, B. B. (2013). Research design and methods: A process
approach (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill Education.