Variables

Question 1

What is the independent variable?

Answer 1

• The thing that is manipulated/changed.
• E.g. the different groups, different conditions.

Question 2

What is the dependent variable?

Answer 2

• The thing that is measured / will be affected by the changes.

Question 3

What is operationalisation?

Answer 3

• Means how we are going to measure our variables. We must define how we intend to measure IV + DV.
• E.g. time in minutes or seconds, distance in meters or km, amount of water in ml or litres.

Question 4

What are the different controls?

Answer 4

• Random allocation
• Counterbalancing
• Randomisation
• Standardisation

Question 5

What is randomisation?

Answer 5

• The use of chance in order to control for the effects of bias when designing materials and deciding the order of conditions.

Question 6

What is standardisation?

Answer 6

• All participants should be subjected to the same environment, info and exp, also the same instructions.

Question 7

What are extraneous variables and how can they be controlled?

Answer 7

• Anything that could impact the dependent variable that is not the independent variable (anything outside the experiment)
• E.g. ppts mood, weather etc.
• You design experiment taking into consideration when and where ppts complete the experiment in order to control extraneous variables.

Question 8

What are confounding variables?

Answer 8

• Anything other than the IV which has actually influenced your results which has not been accounted for before the experiment begins.
• possible examples include: personality, mood.