Experimental Psychology HELP

Question

A group of psychology students plans to have an experiment to investigate whether giving people material incentives makes them pay more attention. They use randomized stratified sampling to invite students from other courses to their study. They decide to vary the IV in 3 ways: Group 1 will receive candy before they are asked to listen to a lecture, Group 2 will be given candy in the middle of the lecture, and Group 3 will receive nothing. Since there are 3 classrooms available for use in the psychology department, the group decides to assign a particular experimenter to each room so that the experiments can take place at the same time and reduce confounding due to time of day. Amparita is assigned to Group 1, Ciriaca for Group 2, and Expedito Jr. for Group 3. The experimenters are also given the task of handing out the candy to the participants (except of course, for Group 3).

a.What is your research question (1 only)?

b. Independent Variable?

c. treatment conditions?

d. Dependent Variable?

e. Measurement/operationalization of DV?

f. extraneous variables/error?

g. Methods of control that should be applied to correct the errors *

Answer 1

Hello!

a. There are many possible variations of the research question the students are asking, but essentially it is: do material incentives help people pay more attention?

b/c. The IV is what is being manipulated by the researchers: material incentives (candy). However, there are 3 treatment groups, or levels, of the IV: candy before the lecture, candy during the lecture, and no candy.

d/e. The DV is what is being measured by the researchers, so, attention. This is being operationalized (or defined by) level of attention of the lecture. Although this blurb doesn't state exactly how it is operationalized, you could say this could be done by students taking a quiz after the lecture to test their level of attention, taking a self-report survey saying how much they were paying attention, or through them being asked to repeat what they learned.

f. Some possible extraneous variables are previous interests (if all the students are biology students, maybe putting them in a history class would harm their attention due to them not being interested, regardless of the incentives), liking of candy (if the students dislike candy, then the "incentive" isn't really an incentive), or the fact that 3 different researchers are administering the incentive.

e. I would have only one researcher administer the incentive to each group (opposed to 3 different ones) in order to limit outside effects and inadvertent biases from having multiple different people.