Question

2. You want to design a study to evaluate whether an anti-bullying program causes a reduction in bullying behavior among middle school students. Describe your study design in enough detail that another researcher could replicate it, including stating your research hypothesis, indicating your independent and dependent variables, and explaining your rationale for the design. What are two potential criticisms of your study?

Answer 1

To know whether an anti-bullying program causes reduction in bullying behavior among middle school students, an experimental design known as the 'between-groups design' can be utilized. A between-group design, also known as the independent measures or between groups design has different subjects assigned to different conditions or treatment levels of the independent variable. Therefore, there are different sets of subjects, who are randomly assigned to different levels or conditions of the independent variable. Randomization provides an equal chance to each participant for being assigned to different levels of the independent variable. So, there will be an experimental group (Group A) of middle school students, who will be exposed to an anti-bullying program, and there will be a control group (Group B) of middle school students, who will not be exposed to the anti-bullying program.

A null hypothesis is a statement, which the experimentor tries to disprove, by obtaining no relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The null hypothesis for the above mentioned study will be "The anti-bullying program does not cause a reduction in bullying behavior among middle school students". An alternative hypothesis is a statement, which the experimentor tries to prove, by obtaining a statistically significant difference between independent and dependent variables.The alternative hypothesis will be "The anti-bullying program causes a reduction in bullying behavior among middle school students".

An independent variable is the variable that is either altered or controlled to study it's outcomes on a variable, dependent on it. The independent variable in the hypotheses is the 'anti-bullying program'. A dependent variable is the variable which is measured and studied, in relation to the independent variable. The dependent variable in the hypotheses is 'bullying behavior'.

A criticism of the study can be the variations among participants in the groups, which adversely affects the outcome, in case of between-group design. These differences can be in age or gender or social background. These differences are hidden or extraneous variables, specifically known as the participant variables. Absence of homogeneity in a set can generate faulty results and conclusions, and can prevent occurrence of true patterns and data. Since between-group design will be used for the study, there are chances of biasness. Assignment bias, observer-expectancy bias and subject-expectancy bias can result in skewed data in between-group experiments.