Shannon conducts an experiment to test her hypothesis that longer arguments cause couples to become angrier at each other.She randomly assigns couples to argue for either ten minutes or twenty minutes.After her assistant Ken runs the study, Ken tells Shannon that he allowed the couples who were really fighting hard to keep arguing longer than Shannon had originally stated.Shannon cringes, for she knows that the ________ of his study is very low.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The internal validity of the study is low because Ken did not follow the protocol set by Shannon, which may have introduced confounds and impacted the accuracy of the results. This compromises the ability to draw causal conclusions about the effect of argument length on anger, making the study less internally valid. Random assignment (A) and random selection (B) are not directly relevant to the issue of internal validity in this scenario. Meaningfulness (D) is not a commonly used concept in research methodology and is not applicable here.

Shannon Conducts an Experiment to Test Her Hypothesis That Longer