Variables, Reliability and Validity
Variables, Reliability and Validity
Variables, Reliability & Validity
Please answer each question thoroughly (generally, 2-3 sentences each). Feel free to use your book and notes here. Be evaluative and critical. Not all theories are equally convincing, nor are all studies methodologically sound. Tell when you think specific theories or studies have problems. Don’t be uncritically accepting of what you read.
NO QUOTATIONS ALLOWED. YOU MUST WORK ON PUTTING THIS IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
Here’s a story you can read about in the popular press:
80 Percent of College Students Text While Driving (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/11/study-80-percent-of-college-students-text-while-driving (Links to an external site.))
- What kind of claim is this—frequency, association, or cause?
- What is/are the variable(s) in the claim?
- What seems to be the operationalization of the “texting while driving” variable?
- What forms of reliability might be relevant for this operationalization? How would you establish each form of reliability?
- Is this operationalization valid? How might you establish the predictive or concurrent validity of their texting-while-driving operationalization? What kind of data would you need to collect and how would you do that? Sketch a well-labeled graph that shows an expected empirical outcome, if the study has good concurrent validity.
Please include a reference page in APA format
Submission: Your paper will be submitted via the Assignment feature in Webcourses. When you submit your assignment it will immediately be run through Turnitin.com, an automated system that instructors can use to quickly and easily compare each student’s assignment with billions of web sites, as well as an enormous database of student papers that grows with each submission. Turnitin will send me a report that states if and how another author’s work was used in the assignment. That is, it checks for plagiarism. As stated in the Course and University Policies, plagiarism is a violation of the Golden Rule and is therefore completely unacceptable. Thus any plagiarized work will result in a 0 for that Assignment. This assignment will not be dropped from the calculation of your overall course grade.
For a more detailed look at the Turnitin process please visit www.turnitin.com
Help for writing:
- Paper should be original work that has been both grammar and spell checked. You can answer the question directly (meaning include question or just have the number) and responses should be about 6-8 sentences each. Work should be double-spaced and should have plenty of citations in APA format! It should also have a reference page attached.
- All submissions will be run through Turnitin so please do not plagiarize at it is a violation of the university honor code. If you are confused about plagiarism, please see files under module “ancillaries” for assistance
If you need more help on how to summarize an article:
Best APA site out there: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/563/1/
Andrews University: Guidelines for Writing an Article Summary
UConn: How to Summarize a Research Article
Plagiarism:
Any direct quotation MUST be placed within quotes and cited. Citing alone does not make it not plagiarized! As I am not allowing ANY quotation this should not even be an issue!
Citing merely tells the reader where the information is coming from – using direct quotations “” tells the reader it is a direct quote from someone else. Why is this important? Well chiefly, it’s not your words or work. Secondly, if you have the reader feels the information is wrong they can seek out the original source to verify that information a) wasn’t taken out of context or b) is indeed wrong.
Remember, you are typically better off loosing points for having nothing in your own words than plagiarizing someone else.
Course policy is that any plagiarism results in an automatic 0 on the assignment.
University policy is that this is a violation of the university honor code and as such must be reported!!!
So please do NOT plagiarize!
