Ninth Edition CoverGraziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)

Chapter 3 Exercises
The Starting Point: Asking Questions

The following exercises are designed to give you hands-on practice of the skills learned in this chapter.

  1. Below are several descriptions of potential research projects. For each, you are to: (a) identify the variables; (b) Indicate the type of variable (organismic, behavioral, stimulus); and (c) Identify potential extraneous variables.
    (1) You are investigating the relationship of a person's sex to how his or her assertive behavior is perceived.
    (2) You are looking at the effect that prompting by the teacher has on the rate of learning in preschool children.
    (3) You are looking at the effects of specific drugs on the activity level of hamsters.
    (4) You are investigating the impact of prior musical training on the ability to distinguish between two very similar tones.
    (5) You are evaluating the effectiveness of two treatment programs for people who are suffering from panic disorders.
    (6) You are comparing attitudes toward foreigners in people who either have served in the Peace Corp or have not served in the Peace Corp.
    (7) You are evaluating the effects of Agent Orange on combat veterans who served in Viet Nam.

  2. For each of the following research situations, identify the potential ethical issues in the study and describe the appropriate safeguards that you would take:
    (1) You are evaluating the effectiveness of electric shock in reducing the self-destructive behavior of autistic children.
    (2) You are evaluating the relationship between frustration and failure and later aggressiveness in college students. You manipulate the level of frustration and failure by giving each student a task that appears to be easy, but is actually impossible, and you tell the student that most people have no difficulty with the task.
    (3) In a physiological study, you are surgically altering one of the neuro-pathways in rats to observe the effect on learning.
    (4) You are studying an aspect of perceptual processing by requiring participants to make a same/difference rating for pairs of stimuli.

  3. At the end of Chapter 2, we asked you to generate some research questions. Now we want you to generate more, but this time try to refine them further by clearly identifying the major variables included in the questions. For example:
    Question: How much does alcohol affect driving?
    Variables: Alcohol, driving.

  4. Some brief descriptions of research follow. For each one, you are to (i) identify the variables, (ii) indicate the class of variables to which each belongs, and (iii) identify any potential extraneous variables.
    (a) You are investigating the relationship between children’s ethnic prejudices and their socioeconomic status.
    (b) In a study on the effects of alcohol on driving, participants are randomly assigned to seven conditions of alcohol consumption: 0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 ounces, respectively. Participants in each condition are tested in a driving simulator, and the number of driving errors is measured. The hypothesis is that higher consumption of alcohol will cause greater driving errors.
    (c) Shoppers are asked to compare two laundry products while being videotaped for a television commercial. During the comparison the products’ labels are covered, supposedly so the participants cannot identify them. The participants know they are not supposed to see the labels. However, the covering on one product, the sponsor’s product, is thinner than the other, and the participants can actually see what the label says. Will the sponsor’s product be chosen more than the other as the superior product?
    (d) You are investigating the relationship between size (a height-weight measure) and peer status in sixth-grade children.

  5. Some research situations follow. What are the potential ethical problems in each? Where you can, indicate what safeguards you would use.
    (a) A researcher is going to test third- and fourth-graders to compare boys and girls on their interest in math problems.
    (b) A study of small-group interactions is being conducted with adults as participants. The participants, observed in groups of five people, do not know that three of the five participants in their group are actually assistants of the researcher and that their behavior during the small-group meeting has been planned ahead of time.
    (c) A researcher wants to examine the files on hospitalized patients with schizophrenia to obtain basic information about their families.

  6. Suppose you have designed a research project using human participants, written a research proposal, and submitted it to your Institutional Review Board for clearance on ethical issues. The board returns your proposal as “ethically unacceptable” because the design is so flawed that the information from the study would be meaningless. There is no other issue raised. Why is this criticism of your proposed design an ethical issue and not just a design problem?

  7. Think of several examples of variables that could be independent variables in one study and dependent variables in another.