Exam 11: True Experimental Designs: the Power of Between-Groups and Within-Subjects Designs

In the context of dependent sample designs, all the extraneous variables should be included in the study as independent variables in order to determine their effects.

George is conducting a research on the effectiveness of a new counseling technique in improving the career orientation of participants. Due to the availability of participants and the absence of cases where urgent treatment intervention was needed, there were no issues with the random assignment of participants to treatment groups. George wants to distinguish the effects of the treatment from effects due to client expectations, attention, and other nonspecific aspects. Which of the following control groups is best suited to his cause?

Which of the following is a feature of a within-subjects experimental design?

Factorial designs are used when two or more independent variables are employed simultaneously to study their independent and interactive effects on a dependent variable.

Which of the following is a weakness of the factorial design?

Which of the following is true of participants placed in a matched control group?

Among the two types of between-groups designs, it is easier to protect the confidentiality of responses of the participants in the posttest-only control group design.

A major identifying feature of between-groups design is the random assignment of participants to different treatment conditions.

Which of the following is a weakness of a posttest-only control group design?

Which of the following is true of a counterbalanced crossover design?

Which of the following is a strength of a pretest-posttest control group design?

A researcher must have an entire sample identified and available at the beginning of an investigation.

Which of the following is a weakness of within-subjects design?

Yalda is a research scholar in the Department of Psychology at University of Umbria. She wants to compare the effectiveness of moral education with that of threats of social and financial coercion as a deterrent to tendencies of cheating and corruption. She has resorted to random assignment of the participants to the groups to remove any systematic bias. But, neither Yalda nor the participants have the required amount of time or scope to delve into the treatment specific change of the dependent variable in each participant. She wants her study to have minimal unknown variances to the dependent variable. She does not want threats to internal validity such as history, maturation, order effects, and sequence effects to dilute the effectiveness of her findings. Which of the following research designs is suitable for her study?

A researcher using a crossover design can safely conclude that the treatment which produces the greatest change in the value of the dependent variable is the most effective of the ones being studied.

In all within-subjects designs, the order in which treatments are delivered is the same for all participants.

Participants in a placebo control group are led to believe that the treatment they are receiving is as effective as that being received by the real control group.

Counterbalanced crossover designs help researchers control threats to internal validity due to order effects.

In general, a researcher can use half the number of participants in a counterbalanced crossover design and still retain the same statistical power as in the between-subjects design.

Which of the following describes the most essential rules of research as expressed by Kerlinger's MAXMINCON principle?