Jackson is interested in the effects of violent movies on aggressive behavior. He has some participants in his study watch Grand Torino (his "violent" movie) and others watch Marley and Me (his "nonviolent" movie). Unfortunately, in addition to these movies being very different in their violence level, they also differ in a lot of other ways (one is a comedy, the other isn't, and so forth). This means that Jackson's study has a ____.
A) factorial design
B) confound
C) nonrandom assignment
D) random assignment

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The fact that the two movies differ in multiple ways other than just their level of violence means that there is a confound in Jackson's study. A confound is any factor other than the independent variable that differs between the experimental and control groups and could potentially explain the results. This makes it difficult to determine whether any observed differences in aggressive behavior between the two groups are due to the violence in the movie or some other difference between the groups (such as the genre of the movie).

Jackson Is Interested in the Effects of Violent Movies on Aggressive