DrPaddock Is a Counseling Psychologist Who Is Interested in Decreasing

question 52

Essay

Dr.Paddock is a counseling psychologist who is interested in decreasing adjustment issues in first-year college students.She is curious if having students create collages of their first few weeks of school and then mailing them home will help students feel they have integrated their new life with their old and,as a result,will help them feel less homesick.She samples a group of 100 incoming college freshmen at her university and measures how homesick they are during the first week of school.During Week 4 of school,she has them make the collage and send it home.During Week 7 of school,she measures their homesickness again.She notices a significant reduction in the amount of homesickness from the pretest to the posttest and concludes that her treatment is effective.

-Imagine in Dr.Paddock's study that only 90 of the original participants completed the measure of homesickness during Week 7 (10 participants had left the university and were unavailable).What kind of threat to internal validity does this pose? How does this affect her conclusion that her treatment for homesickness worked?

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Definitions:

Efficient Output

The level of production at which a company or economy can produce the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of input costs.

Cost Curves

Graphs in economics that show how the cost of producing a good or service varies with the quantity produced.

Total Costs

The sum of all expenses incurred by a business in producing goods or services, including both fixed and variable costs.

Profit Maximizing

The process or strategy employed by a firm to determine the price, output level, or operational scale that leads to the highest possible profit.