Dr Paddock Is a Counseling Psychologist Who Is Interested in Decreasing

question 4

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 mail 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.
What is a comparison group? What kind of comparison group could Dr. Paddock add to her study to address several threats to internal validity? (In other words, what would this comparison group do/not do?) Explain why this addition would help address threats to internal validity.

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Definitions:

Inference Forms

Patterns of reasoning that determine the validity of an argument by analyzing its structure.

HS

A logical argument pattern of hypothetical syllogism, involving two conditional statements leading to a conclusion.

MP

Stands for "Member of Parliament," but in a logical context, it refers to a deductive pattern of reasoning where a specific conclusion is inferred from a general rule and a specific case.

Conj

An abbreviation for "Conjunction," a logical operator that connects two conditions or propositions where both must be true.