Chapter 7, Introduction to Descriptive Methods and Correlational Research Video Solutions, Research Design Explained

Problem 1

Steinberg and Dornbusch (1991) found that there is a positive correlation between classcutting and hours per week that adolescents work. In addition, they find a negative correlation between grade-point average and number of hours worked.
a. In your own words, describe what the relationship is between class-cutting and hours per week that adolescents work.
b. In your own words, describe what the relationship is between grade-point average and hours per week that adolescents work.
c. What conclusions can you draw about the effects of work? Why?
d. If you had been analyzing their data, what analysis would you use? Why?

Lucas Finney

Numerade Educator

01:27

Problem 2

Steinberg and Dornbusch (1991) also reported that the correlation between hours of employment and interest in school was statistically significant. Specifically, they reported that $r(3,989)=-.06, p<.001$. [Note that the $r(3,989)$ means that they had 3,989 participants in their study.] Interpret this finding.

Beth Stone

Numerade Educator

05:29

Problem 3

Brown (1991) found that a measure of aerobic fitness correlated +.28 with a self-report measure of how much people
exercised. He also found that the measure of aerobic fitness correlated -.41 with resting heart rate. Is resting heart rate or self-report of exercise more closely related to the aerobic fitness measure?

Angela Chemidlin

Numerade Educator

01:51

Problem 4

In the same study, gender was coded as $1=$ male, 2 = female. The correlation between gender and aerobic fitness was -.58 , which was statistically significant at the $p<.01$ level.
a. In this study, were men or women more fit?
b. What would the correlation have been if gender had been coded as $1=$ female and $2=$ male?
c. From the information here, can you conclude that one gender tends to be more aerobically fit than the other? Why or why not?

Akhil Choudhary

Numerade Educator

00:23

Problem 5

Suppose you wanted to see whether men differed from women in terms of the selfdescriptions they put in personal ads. How would you get your sample of ads? How would you code your ads? That is, what would your content analysis scheme look like?

Nick Johnson

Numerade Educator

Problem 6

Suppose that a physician looked at 26 instances of crib death in a certain town and found that some of these deaths were due to parents suffocating their children. As a result, the physician concluded that most crib deaths in this country are due not to problems in brain development, but to parental abuse and neglect. What problems do you have with the physician's conclusions?

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01:35

Problem 7

Researchers began by looking at how a sample of 5 -year-olds were treated by their parents. Thirty-six years later, when the participants were 41-year-olds, the study examined the degree to which these individuals were socially accomplished. The investigators then looked at the relationship between childrearing practices when the child was 5 and how socially accomplished the person was at 41 (Franz, McClelland, & Weinberger, 1991). They concluded that having a warm and affectionate father or mother was significantly associated with "adult social accomplishment."
a. What advantages does this prospective study have over a study that asks 41-year-olds to reflect back on their childhood?
b. How would you measure adult social accomplishment?
c. How would you measure parental warmth? Why?
d. Assume, for the moment, that the study clearly established a relationship between parenting practices and adult social accomplishment. Could we then conclude that parenting practices account for (cause) adult social accomplishment? Why or why not?
e. Imagine that the researchers had failed to find a significant relationship between the variables of adult social accomplishment and parental warmth. What might have caused their results to fail to reach significance?

Anna Miller

Numerade Educator