AAMC FL1 P/S #21 Help please

[MC789]

This is my reasoning, please help me find where I went wrong:

A seemed likely using common sense, I know there are ethics committees for research and I didn't feel they would agree doing studies on people with psychological issues.

B did not make sense at all: how would assigning anxious participants to stress condition pose a confounding variable?

my understanding of confounding variable: something that influences the relationship between independent and dependent variable, when its present, its no longer a matter of independent variable being the only one to influence dependent variable.

in this study, the independent variable is social stressor = anxiety and dependent variable = prosocial behavior. adding people with anxiety to stressor group is just using people who align with the independent variable. and using these people would help just as much as using people who don't have anxiety because these people with anxiety would probably exhibit social behaviors too. both anxiety and non anxiety disorder people will give similar responses, which would help the study.

so how would using these people be a confounding variable?? so my answer was b = least likely.

C made sense: generalizability is translating results to general population and the study participants are not representative of general population.

D made sense: adding anxiety disorder people to control condition will screw up the results by causing the control participants to seek pro social behavior too.

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[humblethinker]

This is my reasoning, please help me find where I went wrong:

A seemed likely using common sense, I know there are ethics committees for research and I didn't feel they would agree doing studies on people with psychological issues.

B did not make sense at all: how would assigning anxious participants to stress condition pose a confounding variable?

my understanding of confounding variable: something that influences the relationship between independent and dependent variable, when its present, its no longer a matter of independent variable being the only one to influence dependent variable.

in this study, the independent variable is social stressor = anxiety and dependent variable = prosocial behavior. adding people with anxiety to stressor group is just using people who align with the independent variable. and using these people would help just as much as using people who don't have anxiety because these people with anxiety would probably exhibit social behaviors too. both anxiety and non anxiety disorder people will give similar responses, which would help the study.

so how would using these people be a confounding variable?? so my answer was b = least likely.

C made sense: generalizability is translating results to general population and the study participants are not representative of general population.

D made sense: adding anxiety disorder people to control condition will screw up the results by causing the control participants to seek pro social behavior too.

your reasoning for C is great. If you reason for D then you have to reason for B since they use the same logic. The logic in D and B are both testing to see if the test taker understands that biased grouping will create a problem with accurate analysis of the data. The confounding variable introduced by answer choice B is the fact that confirmation bias would occur since all like members would be assigned to a group that would confirm their congruency. Answer choice A is not always true because doing research on people with psychological disorders has varying degrees of ethical consideration dependent on other personal and situational factors related to the specific person. While its possible an ethics committee would go against it, its likely that it would depend on other factors (severity, context, etc) that are not mentioned here and therefore there is no definitive way to rule it out.

 

[MC789]

your reasoning for C is great. If you reason for D then you have to reason for B since they use the same logic. The logic in D and B are both testing to see if the test taker understands that biased grouping will create a problem with accurate analysis of the data. The confounding variable introduced by answer choice B is the fact that confirmation bias would occur since all like members would be assigned to a group that would confirm their congruency. Answer choice A is not always true because doing research on people with psychological disorders has varying degrees of ethical consideration dependent on other personal and situational factors related to the specific person. While its possible an ethics committee would go against it, its likely that it would depend on other factors (severity, context, etc) that are not mentioned here and therefore there is no definitive way to rule it out.

that makes sense, I guess I overthought B and need to figure out the fine line between reasoning accurately but not overthinking it.