SCENARIO.
You are interested in investigating the relationship between altruism and empathy. Specifically, you want to know whether focusing on the feelings of a person in need will lead to greater feelings of empathy and more willingness to help than focusing on that person’s thoughts.
• Write an alternative and null hypothesis. H1 and Ho .
• Identify the most appropriate experimental design (e.g., single-factor or factorial) and explain how exactly it qualifies as that type of design.
• Specify precisely what the independent variable(s) will be, and how they will be manipulated. Also, specify the number of levels of each independent variable if appropriate.
• Specify exactly what the dependent variable(s) will be, and the operational definition for the variable as well as how it will be quantified.
• Specify the procedures that will be followed (e.g., how participants will be obtained, where the experiment will be run, what exactly will take place).This should be detailed enough to clearly illustrate what the manipulation is in the experiment and exactly how the experiment would work.
• Indicate what, if anything, would be done to control extraneous variables and eliminate confounding variables. • Indicate if the experiment could be run as a within-subjects or matched-groups design. If so, what would the matching variables be and why?