Psychology methodology exam question?

Question

'A year ago Jack and Ben, two ten year old boys, were best friends. At Christmas, Jack received a present of the latest games console, and Ben received a present of a new mobile phone with a built in camera. They do not play together much anymore. Jack always wants to stay in and play on his games console. Ben has lots of new friends whom he telephones and sends photographs to. Jack's mum has noticed that fewer friends come to play these days. Ben's mother complains that he always wants to be out.'

i) Design an appropriate study to investigate the relationship between social skills and computer games

ii) Explain and justify your design decisions

iii) Explain and justify how you might analyse and interpret your data.

Any ideas? I'm totally lost and can't come up with anything :(

Please please plleeeeaaassseee help!

Thanks in advance :]

Answer 1

You need to get a group of kids, matched for age, psychosocial variables etc.  You'll need at least 90 kids in this group.

Administer some type of test for social skills (look it up, I'm not doing ALL your work for you!)  All the kids get the test.  This is your baseline measure of social skills.

Now randomly divide the group into three groups of 30 kids each.  Group A gets a game console and 3 of the newest age-appropriate games.  They are to play only these games (to control for confounding variables such as the GFA IV game they got this week) but they can play whenever they want and as long and as short a time as they want.

Group B gets nothing, and in fact, you take away their current game systems.

Group C you ignore. They are your control group

Wait 6 months.  Retest all three groups with the same measure of social skills that you used at the beginning.  Hopefully Group C didn't change because they are your control group.  If they changed it means something outside of the experimental condition caused the change and you have to stop everything and figure out what it was and control for it.

Assume Group C is unchanged.  Then your task is to compare the different results you got between the three groups and create explanations for the differences.

No clue why they put in the bit about the cell phone.  Probably just to confuse you.  Which it did.

Good luck!