Question

A clinical psychologist was interested in how different parenting styles might affect the incidence of neurosis in adults.    Based on observations of her own clients over many years, she hypothesized that unstructured and lax child rearing environments were more likely to result in adult neurosis than well structured and disciplined child rearing.   She created a 20-item questionnaire that asked subjects about their own childhood experiences and also their neurotic tendencies.   She obtained a small government grant to cover the costs of administering the survey through the mail to residents in three large metropolitan areas on the east coast.

From these answers she rated each parenting style along a 1 to 5 scale that varied from very unstructured (1) to very structured (5).   In addition, she rated each participant along a 1 to 5 scale that reflected their degree of neurosis from low levels of neurotic behavior (1) to high levels of neurotic behavior (5).

What study is this?

Independent/dependent variable is?

How many groups of participants were there?

What type of ststistic can most likely be used to analyze the data? What is the hypothesized outcome?

Can you think of another way to test the hypothesis?

What are some potential criticisms of the study?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) What study is this?

This seems to be a study of how rebellious a child can grow up to be depending on the type of parents they had. For instance, a child with excessively clean parents may rebel and grow up to be a messy person. They might be because of the excessive rules about keeping everything too clean and organised while growing up.

Therefore, the author says, “Based on observations of her own clients over many years, she hypothesized that unstructured and lax child-rearing environments were more likely to result in adult neurosis than well structured and disciplined child rearing.”

In this case, the researcher studies compulsive neurotic behaviour.

Independent/dependent variable is?

IV – The child-rearing style

DV – the temperament of the child

How many groups of participants were there?

2, they are disciplined parenting styled individuals and lax parents.

What type of statistic can most likely be used to analyze the data? What is the hypothesized outcome?

Correlation coefficient.

Hypothesis – Structured parenting styles result in lesser neurosis and unstructured parenting results in more neurosis in the child.

Can you think of another way to test the hypothesis?

Ask adults with extreme neurosis and with lax styles about how their parents bought them up as opposed to how they bring their children up.

What are some potential criticisms of the study?

Correlation. There could be a confounding variable, in other words, there could be a whole different factor at play. The factor could possibly be outside the causal link between the criteria A and B. For instance, children who grow up to have neurosis could be so because they had to maintain a certain lifestyle based on their community or peers and not really because of their parents. The links was simply established because unstructured parenting allowed more social time for children with their friends. For instance, Ashley liked her room extremely clean. Her parents adopted the lax parenting style and never forced her to keep her room clean. Also, her parents allowed her to visit her friends frequently for slumber parties. These friends had very clean rooms and Ashley felt like she had to keep up with them and have a pretty room as well.