Answer: your question is incomplete as you did not highlight the story. Please let me assume your questions to be this;
A story at ABCNews.com (“Pet Contact” by Rita Rubin, March 17, 1998) reported that Karen Allen, a researcher at the University of Buffalo, found that couples who own cats or dogs have more satisfying marriages and are less stressed out than those who don’t own pets. Pet owners also have more contact with each other and with other people. Allen compared 50 couples who owned either cats or dogs with 50 pet-free couples. The volunteers completed a standard questionnaire assessing their relationship and how attached they were to their pets. They also kept track of their social contacts over a 2-week period. To see how the couples responded to stress, Allen monitored their heart rates and blood pressure while they discussed sore subjects. Pet-owning couples started out with lower blood pressure readings than the others, and their numbers didn’t rise as much when they argued.
YOUR QUESTION:
describing a study about pet ownership and marriage. Explain whether each of the following is likely to be a problem for that study:
a. Confounding variables and the implication of causation in observational studies.
b. The Hawthorne effect and experimenter effects.
c. Lack of ecological validity and consequent generalization
YOUR ANSWER:
Option A is likely to be a problem for the study of pet ownership and marriage. Option A which is confounding variables and implication of causation in observational studies. Because this research is an observational study, of the relationship pet owners and non pet owners has in their marriage. The observational study has a confounding variable which is the pet, and the implication of causation is seen among married couples. The observational studies concluded that pet owners tends to have a low blood pressure reading and more body contact, than non pet owners. That means pet being the confounding variable has a positive effect on married couples.