Question

A therapist believes that teaching anxious clients group interaction skills can lessen their anxiety. She gives an anxiety test, chooses the 10% most anxious people, and then teaches them group interaction skills. On giving them a second anxiety test she discovers that their anxiety is significantly lower. If she concludes that the teaching has caused lessened anxiety she is ignoring __________ as a potential threat to internal validity.

Answer 1

The correct answer to this open question is the following.

A therapist believes that teaching anxious clients group interaction skills can lessen their anxiety. She gives an anxiety test, chooses the 10% most anxious people, and then teaches them group interaction skills. On giving them a second anxiety test she discovers that their anxiety is significantly lower. If she concludes that the teaching has caused lessened anxiety she is ignoring statistical regression as a potential threat to internal validity.

If we want to determine how a dependent variable is affected by other independent variables in a study, then we use the technique called statistical regression. This technique can be used in statistics or finances to understand the relationship between the variables, before making a decision.