A certain psychologist was looking for the cause of failure

A certain psychologist was looking for the cause of failure among college students. She took a group of former students who had flunked out and a group of students who had received good grades. She gave both groups a self-esteem test and found that the group that flunked out scored lower on the test than did the group that received good grades. She concluded that low self-esteem is one of the causes of college failure and suggested further that a person with low self-esteem probably expects to fail and exhibits defeatist behavior in college, which eventually leads to failure. What was the independent variable? What was the dependent variable and how is it measured? Discuss the study\'s design. What kind of design was used? Was this design appropriate? Why or why not? Was the experimenter justified in her conclusions? Why or why not?

Solution

(a)What was the independent variable?

ans: Independent Variable (IV): Academic success level.

Just another information that might add to your knowledge:

There is something called Level of Experiment: If an experiment compares an experimental treatment with a control treatment, then the independent variable (type of treatment) has two levels: experimental and control. If an experiment were comparing fivetypes of diets, then the independent variable (type of diet) would have 5levels.here the comparison is b/w flunked group versus good grade group. So, no of levels=2

What was the dependent variable and how is it measured?

Ans: Dependent Variable (DV): Self-esteem score. You can assign scores from the subject like in this case, it can be easily asked to value on the scale of 1-10 (1 being the score for lowest self-esteem and 10 for highest self esteem). There can be other methods but this one such.

Discuss the study\'s design. What kind of design was used? Was this design appropriate? Why or why not? Was the experimenter justified in her conclusions? Why or why not?

ans: She carried cross -sectional study design. If you decide that you are going to study a group of people just one time, in a single session, that research design is called cross-sectional research.An obvious pro, or advantage, to cross-sectional research is that it is relatively easy and inexpensive. It\'s also easier to do your study using a large group of people because you only need them for a single session. It\'s easier to get people to agree to be in a study if it only takes a single hour or single day. However, a con, or disadvantage, to cross-sectional research is that you cannot study whether people change over time. That\'s where the second type of research comes into play. So, she did not consider the fact that there might be different phases of previous students over thier graduation(or course) years.

She also did not consider any other external factors. like Extraneous Vs: prior academic experiences; low/high IQ; prior self-esteem levels; family stress; SES (socio economic status).