A social psychologist wanted to know whether decision making processes of conser

Question

A social psychologist wanted to know whether decision making processes of conservatives and liberals differ.    She used an existing and well validated survey called the Political Persuasion Pointer (PPP), which results in a score from 1 (more liberal) to 20 (more conservative) based on how a person responds to 20 questions.    She also used a standard decision making task that asks subjects to make choices involving allocating resources in a series of real-world scenarios about the economy, health care, and the environment.    Each choice is scored against a statistical model that uses Bayes’ theorem to arrive at the optimal choice.   Scores on this task can range from 1 to 20, which higher scores indicating more optimal choices.   

A group of 50 students were recruited from the undergraduate subject pool and seated in a classroom.   After signing statements of informed consent, the students were first given the PPP and once that was completed a booklet containing the decision making task.     The researcher performed a median split on the PPP scores by finding the median score on the PPP in her group of subjects and assigning students with scores higher than the median to the conservative group and students with scores lower than the median to the liberal group.  She then performed an independent group’s t-test on the scores from decision making task and found that the groups did not differ.

What type of research design was used? What were the null and research hypotheses? What was the dependent variable? Can you think of an alternative way to analyze the data?  Would it have any advantages?

Explanation / Answer

Descriptive research designs help provide answers to the questions of who, what, when, where, and how associated with a particular research problem; a descriptive study cannot conclusively ascertain answers to why. Descriptive research is used to obtain information concerning the current status of the phenomena and to describe "what exists" with respect to variables or conditions in a situation.

NULL- there would be no significant difference between the decision making process of two groups

alternate-there would be significant difference between the decision making process of two groups

Dependent variable- conservatives and liberals

Two different groups of conservatives and liberals could have ben taken in the inital stage itself to easily access their decision making directly.

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