Chapter 2 Questions for Discussion

1. People seem to love urban legends—those stories of questionable truthfulness that are often circulated via email. (A current popular one warns readers that Facebook will begin charging subscription fees.) Are your friends fooled by them? Take this opportunity to do a quantitative study to describe the beliefs of your friends. Go to the Web site snopes.com and choose five urban legends that you find particularly intriguing. Design a survey question to measure the believability of each one. Ask at least 10 friends or classmates to fill out your survey. Calculate and report the proportion of people who found each urban legend believable. Does this study primarily serve the purpose of description, prediction, or explanation? [Apply, Comprehend]

2. You can easily turn the above study into one whose goal is to predict who will find urban legends believable. Take a moment to think of a variable that could help predict who would be a believer. You might ask people how strongly they believe in astrology, for example. Design a survey including two questions, one about the believability of the urban legend, and one for the variable you choose, making sure to include a numerical scale for each. Ask at least 10 friends or classmates to fill out your survey. Plot your data in a scatterplot. Does there appear to be a relation between the two variables? What do you estimate the correlation coefficient to be? [Synthesize]

3. Now let’s focus on features of the urban legend itself that could increase its believability. Perhaps the source of the information about the legend might explain why we believe some urban legends and not others. We can easily manipulate this variable experimentally. Try it yourself! Create two versions of an urban legend—one that cites a legitimate authority (e.g., a sheriff) and one that doesn’t. Randomly assign different groups of people to the conditions and ask them to evaluate its believability (using the survey item described above). Calculate the mean believability score for each of your conditions. Was your hypothesis supported? [Synthesize]

4. For your experiment above, consider the importance of random assignment. Identify a personality variable that could influence people’s ratings of believability. How does random assignment help control for the effects of this variable? [Analyze]

5. The items above walked you through two different methods for answering questions about interesting phenomena (survey research and experimentation). The appropriateness of these methods may be determined by a critical feature of the predictor: whether it can be manipulated or measured. If the predictor can be manipulated, as was the case with our legitimacy of authority variable, we can do experimentation. If the predictor can only be measured, as was the case with our belief in astrology variable, we do survey research. What predictor would you like to investigate? Can it be manipulated? What method will be most appropriate for testing its effects? [Analyze]

6. If you were applying for a job, would you prefer that your potential employer use qualitative or quantitative methods to assess your qualifications? Would you prefer a mix of both? Explain your answer. [Analyze]

7. Assume for the moment that it is true women tend to go to public restrooms in groups. Design a qualitative study to find out why. Which method will you use and why? A clinical case study? Observational study? Community-participation study? [Synthesize]

8. Suppose you want to find out whether there is any truth to your observation that women tend to go to public restrooms in groups. Design a quantitative study to investigate. What will be your population of interest? What steps will you take to make sure the sample you observe is representative of this population? What questions will you ask to help explain your observation? [Synthesize]

9. A Los Angeles Times headline reads “Popular Kids More Likely to Smoke, Research Says” (MacVean, 2012). Considering that these data were likely to have come from a correlational study, identify some potential third variables that could simultaneously cause kids to become more popular and to smoke. [Analyze]

10. We’ve asked questions about women’s tendency to travel to public restrooms in groups and about people’s beliefs in urban legends. What qualifies these questions as scientific? (You may wish to review the definition of scientific presented in Chapter 1.) [Analyze]