SOCI 251 Study Guide - Final Guide: External Validity, Internal Validity, Dependent And Independent Variables
Document Summary
Small groups: briefly explain how experiments provide the types of evidence to establish causality, nonspuriousness through random assignment. Basic idea is that you have no reason to believe the people in group a and b on a range of characteristics that they are no different between the groups. Once you make that assumption, when they go through the experiment, one group you do something to and one group you don"t. When it"s done, you say the only thing that"s different between the groups is what you manipulated. You have to know what factors might bias your study so you can control for them beforehand. External validity - if you replicate the study, how likely are you to have the same results. Mundane - the more mundane an experiment is the more it approximates natural. Show that the only difference is the manipulated variable. Validity - how accurate is your measure of a thing.
