Part I (one point each) Hypothesis: Spending on education, as a percentage of a

Question

Part I (one point each)

Hypothesis: Spending on education, as a percentage of a state’s budget, is lower in states with larger populations of elderly people than states with smaller populations of elderly people.


1  Identify the independent variable and dependent variable in the hypothesis.


2. Explain the reasoning behind your answer to Question A.


3. What is the unit of analysis for the hypothesis?


4. Identify a possible intervening variable and rewrite the hypothesis to include it (along with the original variables). You can do this with an arrow diagram, if you prefer.



Part II (one point each)

Hypothesis: Government agencies tend to become more efficient when forced to compete with private companies providing similar services.

  Explain why each of the hypotheses below is not as good (as a social science research question) as this one.

1. Government agencies only work right when they have to compete against private companies.


2. The government should subsidize private school tuitions in areas where public schools are failing.


3. The more a country promotes private industry, the better a government agency will perform.




Part III

1. One of the examples below involves an ecological fallacy; the other involves regression toward the mean.  Which is which? (2 points)


  A) You want to know whether high school students who participate in more extracurricular activities are more likely to receive scholarships to attend college.  So you study one hundred high schools, examining the relationship between the percentage of students in a school who participate in one or more extracurricular activities and the percentage of students who receive scholarships.

  B) You want to know whether smaller class sizes can improve school performance on standardized tests.  So you take the 100 high schools with the lowest passing rates in the country, reduce their class sizes, and test the students again.



2. Choose one of the two examples above, tell me whether it’s a threat to internal validity or external validity, and explain why it is.  Try to be specific about the threat in this particular study. (You can get credit for describing the threat well even if you name the wrong type of validity. 3 points)

Explanation / Answer

Spending on education, as a percentage of a state’s budget, is lower in states with larger populations of elderly people than states with smaller populations of elderly people.


1  Identify the independent variable and dependent variable in the hypothesis.

Independet variable - Populations of elderly peopld

Dependent variable - Spending on education as a percentage of budget
2. Explain the reasoning behind your answer to Question A.
Independent variable is population of elderly people as the same cannot be controlled externally nor a decision on increasing/decreasing it can be made.

3. What is the unit of analysis for the hypothesis?
Unit of analysis is the states of the country.

4. Identify a possible intervening variable and rewrite the hypothesis to include it (along with the original variables). You can do this with an arrow diagram, if you prefer.

Population of elderly people - Population of children aged 5-12 - Spending on education.

Spending on education, as a percentage of a state’s budget, is lower in states with larger populations of elderly people or lower populations of children aged 5-12

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