Sociology 2206A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Likert Scale, Hawthorne Effect, Confounding
19 Apr 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
The logic beyond (isolation) o th , 2016. Cause: an explanation of a characteristic, attitude, behaviour, or event. Change in one variable leads to change in another variable, (other things be equal): direction of influence (time order) 2. ( or : elimination of rival/ extraneous/ confounding explanations or spuriousness. In order to say x is the only cause of y. Strong in testing a causal relationship (internval validity). Testing one causal factor one at a time. Constancy of conditions across groups (besides the treatment). Comparing experiment & control groups o o o o. Minimize the pre-existing differences before the experiment. Problematic in real life (practicality of experimental design). Rules out possibility of extraneous variables: random assignment. Treatment and control groups treated exactly alike except iv (cause). Generalizability: what the results mean outside the particular context of the experiment. (can we say something about the population outside the experiment?) Psychological experiment: human nature is universal, so therefore demographics have little impact.
