Imagine you were conducting research on the relationship between academic performance (e.g., better grades) and different levels of loudness of music (interval scale) while studying.
- How would you design the study using a correlational design?
- How would you design the study using a quasi-experimental design?
- How would you design the study using an experimental design?
Just a note that the experimental design tends to be the most challenging to work with for this assignment, so I wanted to elaborate a bit more on this, and the possibility of including what is known as a ‘control’ condition…. It is actually the only one of these designs where you would need to split participants into groups prior to the study…. One example would be that without the ‘silent/no music’ condition it wouldn’t be possible to tell if there was an overall increase or decrease in performance (or no change)–that is, perhaps the rocknroll group would score higher than the hip hop, but without the control condition, we wouldn’t know if this were because both were doing poorly (the rr group just less poorly) or even if both were doing better (the rr group improving more than the hh group). Note that our ability to draw a causal connection between the IV & DV is directly related to internal validity, and supported by *random assignment* (see below)—Also, I found this
http://www.experiment-resources.com/experimental-research.html
‘user-friendly’ website that I wanted to share with everyone… Keep in mind the importance of *random assignment* in true experiments (as opposed to random selection in your sampling method)—this is critical for internal validity, the main strength of the experimental design. Hope this helps!
