Lab Two
With a conceptual and testable question at hand, the next step is to refine and develop your research question by thinking more about the variables and design of your study.
Learning Objectives
For this lab assignment, you will be working with your team members to:
- Refine your conceptual and/or testable question
- Consider the independent (cause) and dependent (outcome) variables for your study
- Consider the best way to manipulate and measure your variables
Overview
How will you test your research question? To answer this question, first propose what the independent variable(s) and dependent variable(s) and their levels for your study will be.
Next, discuss with your team members the design of your study i.e., how you can best manipulate your variables to test the question at hand? Consider these questions:
- Is this a between subjects or within subjects design?
- Is the best way to answer the question at hand through a vignette or activity manipulation, or through a different methodology altogether?
Remember: The questions in the worksheet will guide your thought process to help develop and design your study. Also keep in mind other factors that was learnt in the previous class (e.g., manipulation check, extraneous variables, and other validities) while designing your study.
Examples
Here are is an example to help guide you through this week’s assignment. The bolded question is an example conceptual question based on one independent variable and one dependent variable:
How do certain stereotypes affect peoples interpretation of other peoples musical genre?
- Independent variable: Personality types
- Levels of the independent variable: Categorized as either introverts or extroverts
- Dependent variable: Opinion on musical genre
- Measuring dependent variable: How likely do you think Person A is to listen to N genre of music from a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 5 (very likely)?
Worksheets
The variable that is manipulated the experimenter (cause)
The variable that is measured as an outcome (effect)
Each participant experiences only one condition
Each participants experiences all of the conditions
A measure of how well the manipulation worked in affecting what it was intended to
Variables that were not considered or variables you were not interested in studying that could affect the results of the experiment
