Nasaa Henderson
Research Methods
Psyc 221 I would do an experiment on how kids that eat sugar before bed sleep is affected.
Description: I would randomly select children between the ages of 5 and 7. I would choose these children by asking those simple questions such as how often do they have sweets before bed. Depending upon their response that would determine if I would think they would be a good fit for my experiment. A child that answers they hardly ever have sweets I would not pick them because they may be more widely affected. I wouldn’t choose a child that always has sweets either because they may not be affected at all; they may be used to it. I want the children that have sweets every now and again to see if it affects their sleeping habits or if it makes it harder for them to go to sleep. The independent variable is the amount of sugar the child is given. The dependant variable is the reaction the children give to the sugar before bed or how much longer it takes them to fall to sleep.
How I would control a confounding variable is by giving that variable the same amount of sugar that everyone else in the experiment has. I would not do anything special to that variable. It is important to give all the children the same amount of sugar. It is always that one variable in an experiment that you cannot tell they were a confounding variable, so that’s why it is important to treat it the same. But like I stated above, I would ask them questions to try to keep them variables as low as possible.
It is also important to have a random sample without questioning anyone. So what I would do to randomly select the children is write a number on a slip of paper and let