This is pissing me the fvck off now really bad and I wanna strangle someone.
I have no idea why for 3 months we've been going over this crap, but I, and 90% of my class still gets this one thing wrong. (my professor jokes about it like "I know you all love confounds" but I've never seen so many problems over one fvckn word)
It cant be my professors hes explained it 100 times. My final is in 2 days, I've been studyn my behind off, but he gave us a sheet tonight to do just on confounds (because of the complaints) and I'm STILL getting this crap wrong.
I DO NOT fvckn get it.
Can someone please help me who understands this?
One of the questions.
1) Dr. Jane Smith wondered whether the sex of an examiner influenced responses by male participants on the Attitude Toward Women scale. The ATW scale measures whether an individual has liberal or conservative attitudes toward women’s rights. She asked Dr. Tatsuhiko Toyota to administer half of the questionnaires so she could compare the ATW score for males tested by a male vs. female examiner. Dr. Smith found that her respondents had much more liberal ATW scores than Dr. Toyota's. She concluded that men "act more liberal to gain approval from women; whereas, they reveal their true 'macho" selves to other men.
What is the confound?
My answer: name of the test.
If you name the test "Attitude Towards Women" scale, you don't know whether the experimenter is causing the liberal attitude, or the test itself. So you can't say "men act more liberal to gain approval from women", because the test name alone is contributing to that reaction. That was my answer.
Professor wrote in the answer key "ethnicity of experimenter".
wtf!! am I an idiot? It seems obvious when you see it but impossible w/out the answer..
2)
An airport administrator investigated the attention span of air traffic controllers to determine how many incoming flights the average controller could coordinate at the same time. Each randomly selected controller was tested without his or her knowledge by a computer program which fed false flight Information to a computer terminal. The controller first "received" information from one plane and by the end of the hour was coordinating the flight pattern of ten planes simultaneously. The administrator analyzed the errors collected by the computer program. The analysis revealed that six was the maximum number of planes a controller could handle without making potentially fatal errors. Also, no errors occurred when only one to three planes were incoming. He concluded that a controller should never coordinate more than six incoming flights.
My answer: Practice effect on the timing of received false information (I was thinking as the controller recieves information he gets practice, and overtime he becomes better at his job)
Professor said: Fatigue (end of hour vs begining)
uhhh!!!!!!!! Its the SAME fvckn thing why can I not understand this? I have NEVER went over something so much in my fvckn life and consistently just not understood it. I honestly DO NOT understand what a fvckn confound is. Theres a million and one things that can throw an experiment off but it always seems the confound is specific and sticks out for some reason.
I've read/heard at least 10 different definition and I STILL cant get it right in practice.
Does anyone have a solid grasp of how to understand this?
Ask me a question please, make me understand this!!! I need to graduate lol
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