PSY 250 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Dependent And Independent Variables, Causal Inference, External Validity
Document Summary
You as the researcher designate conditions that participants will be exposed to. Does the iv cause the dv? (manipulates iv and observes dv) Random assignment- reduces the ambiguity of causal relationships (holds constant other extraneous variables) Group of participants- randomly assigned to a different group. Extraneous variables- personality and iq should be similar. Intervention- go into some setting and change a variable in the environment, and observe its effects; how we intervene in any way in an environment. An experiment must be designed and conducted so that only the iv can be the cause of the results, meaning we have to control for a lot of different extraneous variables. Internal validity exists when the results of an experiment can be confidently attributed to the effect of the iv. Extraneous factors affect dv (confounding variables) not measured because they weren"t accounted for.
