EXERCISES AND PROJECTS

A company is planning an antismoking campaign for its employees who indicated on their job application that they smoke. The management has decided that all smoking employees will participate in a series of seminars conducted by local health officials. As a consultant for this project, you suggest that the campaign would be more effective if, in addition to attending the seminars, employees are sent a personal letter from the president of the company encouraging them to stop or cut down on their smoking.

1. What is your research hypothesis?
2. What is the independent variable?
3. What is the dependent variable?
4. Which is the experimental group?
5. Which is the control group?

You are conducting an experiment on the effects of pornography on male perceptions of women. You have two groups of subjects, experimental and control, of 50 men each. Both groups will take a pretest measuring of their perceptions of women. Then, over the period of a week, the experimental group will be shown six hours of pornographic films depicting explicit sexual activity. About a week after the experimental subjects have seen the films, both groups will be posttested and compared with respect to their changed perceptions of women. Suggest and explain possible situations which could cause the validity of your research to be threatened by each of the following factors:

1. Selection
2. History
3. Maturation
4. Experimental mortality
5. Instrumentation and testing
6. Regression artifact

For this project, you are to conduct a field experiment using a factorial design. The topic to be studied is helping behavior. The particular dependent variable we will use here is giving change for a dollar. In each condition of the experiment, you are to ask a stranger for change for a dollar and then record whether he or she makes some effort to help (such as checking their pockets or asking someone else to help you). The independent variables to be examined are (1) recipient "social status" and (2) sex of helper. You can set up two conditions of social status as follows: For a "high-status" condition, dress neatly and conservatively when asking for help; for a "low-status" condition, dress sloppily. Sex of helper is manipulated by asking either males or females for change, depending on which condition of your design you are collecting data for. The design will look like this:

Recipient Social Status
High              Low

Sex of Helper
Male               Female

Within each of the four conditions, you should ask for help from 10 people. Be sure to work out a method for getting people into the experimental conditions randomly (you may want to ask you instructor for some help on this). Use the following space to report on your experiment.

1. How did you assign people to the experimental condition?
2. Describe briefly how you manipulated the independent variable of recipient social status.
3. How might the dependent variable have been measured using more than the two categories "helped" and "didn't help"?
4. What percentage of males helped? What percentage females helped? Did sex of the people who were asked for help influence helping behavior?
5. What percentage of "high-status" people were helped? What percentage of "low-status" people were helped? Did the social status of the person needing help influence helping behavior?
6. Fill out the following table, giving the percentage of people who helped in each of the experimental conditions.
   
   Recipient Social Status
   High ___               Low___
   
   Sex of Helper
   Male ___               Female___


7. Was there an interaction between the independent variables in this experiment? If so, describe what it was.
8. Write a brief report presenting the conclusions of your study. Briefly discuss why this study might be lacking in internal and external validity.