PSYC 2606 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Sample Size Determination, Antipsychotic, External Validity
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Vary the quantity or the quality of the variable. Example: you are testing a hypothesis that states that a schizophrenia antipsychotic medication at 30mg for two months would help psychotic episodes. You would need different groups that are given different concentrations of the drug to measure its effects. A control group gets no drug to measure that any drug at all has an effect. See if the independent variable had an impact on behavior. Independent variable (iv)- factor of variable being studied (manipulated by experimenter): dependent variable (dv)- behavior being studied. Involves some measure: example: being touched by a waitperson induces positive reactions in a restaurant costumer. Iv= amount of touching: avoid touching costumer, briefly touching costumer (0. 5 seconds, prolonged touching of costumer (1. 0 seconds, dv= costumer reaction (tip/gratuity, sample size (n): the number of subjects involved in a study. Just because a and b are correlated, it does not mean that a caused b.
