Question

A researcher wants to examine the relation between viewing television violence and behaving aggressively. He has participants decide whether they would prefer to view a violent or a non-violent television program, and subsequently records the number of aggressive behaviors they show in a competitive game. He finds that those participants that watched the violent show display more aggressive behaviors in the game. He concludes that watching the violent TV program caused the subsequent aggression. Given what you know about this study, what, if anything, is wrong with this conclusion?

Answer 1

Answer: The experiment lacks random experiment and no statistical report to back findings

Explanation: The experiment lacks random assignment, there should be a control group and experimental group in this research which should be randomly picked (giving every participant chance of being selected).

His conclusion depicts that the other groups were not really involved. However, the conclusion would have looked right, if he had given statistical report whether the television programme had an influence on the outcome (aggressive behaviour) on the two groups, preferably using the Paired sample T-test.