Question

Basic guide to developing a research design ( Please provide EXAMPLES in terms to Politics !!)
1. What are the treatment and outcome variables? How are they defined and measured?
2. What are the two (or more) groups in your research? That is, what is the treatment
group and what is the control group?
a. How is the treatment assigned to the group? Random vs. selected by something
else? If not randomly assigned, what determines the assignment of the
treatment?
b. Other than the value(s) of the treatment variable, how else might the two
groups differ? What confounding variables might be different between the two?
These variables are potential threats to internal validity

Answer 1

1.

Treatment variable means an independent variable that is not affected by or dependent on any other factors. Outcome variables is a dependent variable whose outcome is affected by or dependent on one or more independent variables. For example, if you want to find out whether there is an impact of advertisement/promotional expenditure on the number of votes received by a contestant, then the advertisement expenditure is a treatment or independent variable that is measured in currency(say, dollars) and the outcome or dependent variable is the number of votes received(measured in numerical terms- number of votes itself is the measure).

2.

Let's take two groups in our research. One is treatment group in which the participants are exposed to election campaign and receive gifts from election contestants and the control group in which the participants are not exposed to any election campaign and do not receive anything.

a. The treatment is assigned randomly to the group. By taking the sample of some number of people (say, 1000) from all possible corresponding areas.

b. Even though, we have taken two independent groups being a treatment and a control group, those two groups might be affected by their prior knowledge of various contestants and some of them might be biased and already fixed to vote a certain candidate, no matter what because there are people who are completely Democratic and completely Republic regardless of anything else. These prior knowledge and biasedness of participants are called confounding variables as they affect both the groups. Proper care must be taken to control confounding variables for the results of the research to be valid and reliable.