Dr Abu Is a Social Psychologist Who Believes That Eating

Dr. Abu is a social psychologist who believes that eating dinner together as a family each night is related to increased academic performance in school for school-age children. To assess this, she measures how often her study participants have a family dinner and the academic performance of the family's school-age children at the beginning and end of the year. In Dr. Abu's study, _____ is the independent variable, whereas _____ is the dependent variable.

A) the number of family dinners; academic performance
B) the number of children in a family; academic performance
C) academic performance; the number of family dinners
D) academic performance; the number of children in a family