AP Psych Barrons

Point 6 — How could Professor Willborn organize her participants to gather data in her
correlational study?—Awarded if you explained how two pieces of data (the two variables:
playing violent video games and attitude toward real-world violence) are gathered from each
participant in the correlational study. You will NOT be awarded the point if you implied that
participants are divided into separate groups based on the independent variable.
Point 7 — What kind of conclusion would Professor Willborn be able to form based on the results
of her experimental study?—Awarded if you explained that the experimental study could lead
to a causal inference about the relationship between the independent variable and the
dependent variable. You can explain this conceptually or through an example of a causal
conclusion based on this study.
Point 8 — What kind of conclusion would Professor Willborn be able to form based on the results
of her correlational study?—Awarded if you explained that the correlational study could lead
to predictions about the relationship between the variables. You will NOT be awarded the
point if you implied that correlational studies can lead to causal inferences about the
relationship between the variables. You can describe how the study might indicate that one
variable increases as the other variable increases (positive correlation), one variable decreases
as the other variable increases (negative correlation), or that the study might establish no
statistical relationship between the variables (no or zero correlation). You can also use
correlation coefficients (r values) correctly to gain the point.
Sample Essay
Professor Willborn should redesign her study as an experiment or a correlation. These methods are
considered to get better data than naturalistic observation studies.
When she redesigns her study as an experiment, Professor Willborn would have to assign the
variables correctly. In every experiment, there is an independent variable and a dependent variable. In
this study, the independent variable is video games and the dependent variable is how violent the
video games are and what that does to the players attitude toward violence. So what she could do is
find a sample of people willing to do her experiment, get them all to play violent video games in her
lab under controlled conditions, and then observe them to figure out whether they enjoyed the violence
in the video games or not. In this way the dependent variable is operationally defined by getting
everyone to play violent video games in a controlled way that she can measure. She could organize her
participants to gather her data by making sure they are all present and ready for the testing, and again
by measuring them carefully. Also, she should probably set up this experiment in a double-blind way.
Since the people playing the games don’t know what she’s testing, they wouldn’t be bias and change
their natural reactions. In the end, after doing all this, Professor Willborn should be able to conclude
whether playing violent video games causes people to change their attitudes about real-world violence.
It might turn out that playing violent video games causes people to not care as much about violence
they see in their lives.
When she redesigns her study as a correlational study, Professor Willborn should try to correlate the
important variables to figure out whether they correlate or not. In her study, just like in the
experimental study, she would chose the variables “playing violent video games” and “attitude toward