Final answer:
Parallel Group Designs involve random assignment of participants to treatment and control groups, with considerations for explanatory and response variables, treatments, participant selection, lurking variables, and the use of blinding to prevent bias.
Step-by-step explanation:
Considerations for 'Parallel Group Designs'
In Parallel Group Designs, each participant is assigned to one of two or more groups. These groups include various treatment groups and a control group. Experimental Design and Ethics are crucial aspects to ensure the reliability of data gathered from such studies.
Explanatory and response variables are defined with the former being the factor of interest altered by the researcher, and the latter is the outcome observed following the treatment.
Treatments refer to different conditions applied to the subjects in the experimental groups, whereas the control group receives a placebo.
Participant selection should ensure representation and eliminate bias, thus requiring careful consideration for random assignment.
Random division of participants into groups is fundamental; however, ethical considerations must be accounted for, especially in sensitive scenarios such as driving without distraction versus texting while driving.
Lurking variables that could interfere with the study need to be identified to ensure that they do not affect the outcome.
Blinding can be utilized to prevent bias, where neither the researchers nor the participants know which group they belong to during the course of the study.
Last but not least, in the context of engineering or physics, when discussing series and parallel connections, as seen in Box 13.1, significant considerations such as the effect on resistance and power in circuits are taken into account. Equivalent series resistance increases while equivalent parallel resistance decreases and power across parallel connections is typically greater compared to series.