-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Guinee [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 1:34 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Gallup/creationism
> Paul Smith wrote:
>
> To his credit, when he announced the faith-based program office,
> Bush explicitly said that the goal was to only promote programs that had
> supporting empirical evidence. An interesting contradiction,
Why? What about a faith-based program that has demonstrated efficacy in
solving a particular social problem (promoting abstinence to decrease std's
and unwanted pregnancies)?
Jim and Paul:
I just happen to have used the following question on a quiz in Research
Methods today:
"You have just conducted a study to determine if asking people to pray
before a test can help people overcome test anxiety. You obtained a sample
of people who suffered from test anxiety and then you randomly assigned them
to one of three groups: some received a review of the material to be covered
on the test (the review group), some received a session on general
test-taking strategies (the strategy group) and some were asked to pray
before taking the test (the prayer group). Test anxiety was then measured
before the test and was found to be significantly lower in the prayer group
than in the review or strategy groups."
I then asked them various questions about the external and internal validity
of the study. One student wrote that it was not an internally valid
experiment because it involves "a spiritual intervention pitted against a
physical intervention." I wasn't quite sure exactly what she meant by that
but I think it had something to do with the fact that since prayer is
spiritual, it couldn't be manipulated as an independent variable.
I think that this does represent an experiment with a high degree of
internal validity because of random assignment. The external validity is, of
course, open to question (what population was sampled?) and, it is important
to realize that you are not testing the effectiveness of prayer as a
supernatural cause but only the effectiveness of the manipulation of asking
people to pray before a test. Further research would need to be done to
distinguish between the various theories of how this occurred. I have, in
previous semesters, asked classes the same question except that I replaced
prayer with a relaxation exercise. It is basically the same situation except
that the manipulation doesn't activate the "spiritual" schema so the same
kind of arguments are not made.
It is for this reason that I also don't see a paradox in a faith-based
program which results in outcomes supported by empirical evidence. Just like
it isn't paradoxical to be skeptical about research into the effects of
optimism.
Rick
Dr. Richard L. Froman
Psychology Department
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, AR 72761
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jbu.edu/sbs/psych/froman.htm
