What kind of conclusion would Professor Willborn be able to form based on the results of her
correlational study?
Awarded if you explained that the correlational study could lead to predictions about the relationship
between the variables. You will NOT be awarded the point if you implied that correlational studies can
lead to causal inferences about the relationship between the variables. You can describe how the study
might indicate that one variable increases as the other variable increases (positive correlation), one
variable decreases as the other variable increases (negative correlation), or that the study might establish
no statistical relationship between the variables (no or zero correlation). You can also use correlation
coefficients (r values) correctly to gain the point.
Sample Essay
Professor Willborn should redesign her study as an experiment or a correlation.
These methods are considered to get better data than naturalistic observation
studies.
When she redesigns her study as an experiment, Professor Willborn would have to
assign the variables correctly. In every experiment, there is an independent
variable and a dependent variable. In this study, the independent variable is video
games and the dependent variable is how violent the video games are and what that
does to the players attitude toward violence. So what she could do is find a sample
of people willing to do her experiment, get them all to play violent video games in
her lab under controlled conditions, and then observe them to figure out whether
they enjoyed the violence in the video games or not. In this way the dependent
variable is operationally defined by getting everyone to play violent video games
in a controlled way that she can measure. She could organize her participants to
gather her data by making sure they are all present and ready for the testing, and
again by measuring them carefully. Also, she should probably set up this experiment
in a double-blind way. Since the people playing the games don’t know what she’s
testing, they wouldn’t be biased and change their natural reactions. In the end,
after doing all this, Professor Willborn should be able to conclude whether playing
violent video games causes people to change their attitudes about real-world
violence. It might turn out that playing violent video games causes people to not
care as much about violence they see in their lives.
When she redesigns her study as a correlational study, Professor Willborn should
try to correlate the important variables to figure out whether they correlate or
not. In her study, just like in the experimental study, she would choose the
variables “playing violent video games” and “attitude toward real-world violence”
as the variables she will correlate. She could operationally define these variables
by being careful how she observes them. If she observes them in a controlled way in
her lab, then they will be operationally defined. What she would have to do is,
again, have people play violent video games in her lab in a controlled way. But in
the correlational study, she would organize her people to get her data by
interviewing them after she times how long they play the games to see if their
attitude toward real-world violence has changed. She would use these interviews to
figure out if their attitude toward real-world violence changed after playing the
video games. Then she could look at how long they played the games and how much
their attitude changed. After she got all her data, she should be able to figure
out if there is a correlation between playing video games and attitude change. She
might find a positive correlation, which means that the people who played violent
video games the most also changed their attitudes the most. Correlation does not
imply causation, but she might find this correlation relationship between these
variables in this study.
This might be a lot of work for Professor Willborn, but if she really wants to
figure out what playing violent video games does to people, she’s going to have to
do something like this. Psychological studies are often complicated and take a lot
of time.