The following exercises are designed to give you hands-on practice of the skills learned in this chapter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Think of several examples of variables that could be independent variables in one study and dependent variables in another.