Instructions: There is no reason you should know any of the following yet. But we want to conduct a little before and after study on what one learns in this course.
1. Let's say we decide to measure people's shoe size as a stand-in for their political ideology. What kind of problem does this method for measuring political ideology have?
(a) reliability (b) accuracy (c) validity (d) precision (e) political correctness
Why?
3. What's wrong with this statement? A study of 500 heroin users and 500 non-users found that 450 of the heroin users also used marijuana (90%) making it quite clear that marijuana is a "gateway" experience for hard drug use.
4. A famous experiment was done by Stanley Milgram in the 1950s: subjects were told they were involved in a "learning reinforcement study" and were asked to administer electric shocks to people in another room who were supposedly trying to learn some task. If the supposed learner got an answer wrong, the subject would be asked to administer a shock and the confederate in the other room would scream as if feeling pain. The real experiment, of course, was to see how long the subject would continue shocking another human just because someone in a white lab coat told them to.
5. What would we need to do to be able to do this kind of research today?
6. What's wrong with this survey question: "Should the government spend less money on the military and more on education?"
7. This chart shows where countries fall on two measures - infant mortality rates (INFMORT, the vertical axis) and women's literacy (LEXFEM, the horizontal axis). What do you make of this data pattern?
'
8. What is this?
