Read the following three scenarios and answer the corresponding questions:
(a) An investigator is interested in studying whether infant childcare leads to an insecure attachment bond between children and their mothers during the first year of life as well as into the preschool years.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
(b) An investigator is interested in studying whether a new drug is as effective as diet and exercise in lowering cholesterol levels in an adult sample.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
(c) An investigator is interested in determining whether sociability in children is related to school achievement and whether this relationship, if any, varies for children in preschool, elementary school, and middle school.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
PART II
Research Designs: Comparing Cross-Sectional, Longitudinal, and Sequential Designs
Directions: Each of the following statements pertains to cross-sectional, longitudinal, or sequential research designs. For each statement, determine which research design it describes.
1. The researcher studies groups of participants who differ in age at the same point in time.
Research design:
2. The researcher is interested in whether frequent exposure to violent television programming in early childhood predicts aggressive and antisocial behavior in adulthood.
Research design:
3. The researcher wants to investigate psychological well-being in middle adulthood for groups of participants born a decade apart.
Research design:
4. Age-related changes may be distorted because of participant dropout, practice effects, and cohort effects.
Research design:
5. The researcher follows a sequence of samples (two or more age groups), collecting data on them at the same points in time.
Research design:
6. This design does not permit the study of individual developmental trends. Age differences may be distorted because of cohort effects.
Research design:
7. To investigate age-related changes in adults’ problem-solving skills, the researcher selects three samples—adults in their thirties, adults in their fifties, and adults in their seventies—and tracks each group for five years.
Research design:
8. To investigate how children of different ages process traumatic events, such as school violence, the researcher recruits children who are in grades 6, 9, and 12 in the 2016–2017 school year and interviews them about their responses to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Research design:
9. The researcher studies the same group of participants repeatedly at different ages.
Research design: