Explain the meaning and characteristics of experimental research. Describe how a researcher can control intervening variables in an experimental research.
As we saw before in the book, an trial is a type of study
designed specifically to answer the question of whether there's a unproductive
relationship between two variables. In other words, whether changes in one
variable ( appertained to as an independent variable) beget a change in another
variable ( appertained to as a dependent variable). Trials have two abecedarian
features. The first is that the experimenters manipulate, or totally vary, the
position of the independent variable. The different situations of the
independent variable are called conditions. Explain the meaning and characteristics of experimental research. Describe how a
researcher can control intervening variables in an experimental research. For illustration, in Darley and
Latané’s trial, the independent variable was the number of substantiations that
actors believed to be present. The experimenters manipulated this independent
variable by telling actors that there were moreover one, two, or five other
scholars involved in the discussion, thereby creating three conditions. For a
new experimenter, it's easy to confuse these terms by believing there are three
independent variables in this situation one, two, or five scholars involved in
the discussion, but there's actually only one independent variable ( number of
substantiations) with three different situations or conditions (one, two or
five scholars). The alternate abecedarian point of an trial is that the
experimenter exerts control over, or minimizes the variability in, variables
other than the independent and dependent variable. Explain the meaning and characteristics of experimental research. Describe how a
researcher can control intervening variables in an experimental research. These other variables are
called extraneous variables. Darley and Latané tested all their actors in the
same room, exposed them to the same exigency situation, and so on. They also
aimlessly assigned their actors to conditions so that the three groups would be
analogous to each other to begin with. Notice that although the words
manipulation and control have analogous meanings in everyday language,
experimenters make a clear distinction between them. They manipulate the
independent variable by totally changing its situations and control other
variables by holding them constant.
Again, to manipulate
an independent variable means to change its position totally so that different
groups of actors are exposed to different situations of that variable, or the
same group of actors is exposed to different situations at different times. Explain the meaning and characteristics of experimental research. Describe how a
researcher can control intervening variables in an experimental research. For
illustration, to see whether suggestive jotting affects people’s health, a
experimenter might instruct some actors to write about traumatic gests and
others to write about neutral gests. The different situations of the
independent variable are appertained to as conditions, and experimenters
frequently give the conditions short descriptive names to make it easy to talk
and write about them. In this case, the conditions might be called the “
traumatic condition” and the “ neutral condition.”
Notice that the
manipulation of an independent variable must involve the active intervention of
the experimenter. Comparing groups of people who differ on the independent
variable before the study begins isn't the same as manipulating that variable.
For illustration, a experimenter who compares the health of people who formerly
keep a journal with the health of people who don't keep a journal has not
manipulated this variable and thus has not conducted an trial. Explain the meaning and characteristics of experimental research. Describe how a
researcher can control intervening variables in an experimental research. This distinction
is important because groups that formerly differ in one way at the morning of a
study are likely to differ in other ways too. For illustration, people who
choose to keep journals might also be more conscientious, more withdrawn, or
less stressed-out than people who do not. Thus, any observed difference between
the two groups in terms of their health might have been caused by whether or
not they keep a journal, or it might have been caused by any of the other
differences between people who do and don't keep journals. Therefore the active
manipulation of the independent variable is pivotal for barring implicit
indispensable explanations for the results.