PSYC 332 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Toaster, Dependent And Independent Variables, Confounding
9 Jul 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
: caused by unknown and unpredictable changes in the experiment. These changes may occur in the measuring instruments or in the environmental conditions. : because no two people are the same, and no two situations are the same. : use random assignment as a way to balance out the noise. e. g. electronic noise in the circuit of an electrical instrument, They may occur because: there is something wrong with the instrument or its data handling system, or because the instrument is wrongly used by the experimenter. : a bigger threat to internal validity is systematic error (bias), that skews the results in a particular direction. :when an iv is systematically paired with another extraneous variable, it is said to confound with that variable. Or simply, the extraneous variable is a confound of the experiment. Iv: on saturday give half subjects bill, on sunday toaster oven. Control for as many variables as possible.
