Hi
On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, John W. Kulig wrote:
> Spotting confounds is best done after you know what the researchers
> concluded. _If_ the researcher were to claim that men, in general, are more
> helpful, we'd have a task confound because the study used only one task -
> helping with keys. Ideally, you'd want to utilize a variety of tasks in
> different settings, and, you might see a task-by-gender interaction. On the
> other hand, if the researcher merely claimed that men are more helpful in this
> situation, tbe criticism disappears.
I would not call this a confound. Confounds generally concern
internal validity; that is, some factor that is correlated with
the factor under study (in this case gender). Task cannot be
correlated with gender because it has no variation. The problem
of task appears to me to be associated with external validity;
that is, are the results generalizable to other tasks/situations?
As John notes, we could be more confident of this if multiple
situations had been used.
Best wishes
Jim
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James M. Clark (204) 786-9313
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L02A
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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