(how many on this list ever thought they'd see that subject heading here???)
On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Brendan Nelson wrote: > > > It's a bit of a chicken'n'egg question I suppose. > > > > Not in this case....the power of the experiment is that you're able to > > ferrett out the causal element... > > > > Take a population of subjects and split them in two (or three, four, etc.) > > such that if you compare the resulting groups to each other, there is no > > substantive difference. There aren't more women than men, there aren't > > significant income differences, etc. > > > > Then you expose one group to one set of stimuli, and expose the other > > group to some sort of placebo. > > > > The difference in the response to the dependent variable HAS to come from > > exposure to the stimuli. > > There are a lot of problems with an experiment like that, though, IMHO. > First off, the test subjects would almost certainly arrive having already > developed attitudes towards both violent hip-hop and violence as a means of > conflict resolution, which I think could skew the results significantly. Let's say that men are more likely to have developed attitudes in favor of violence, and women are in the opposite direction. All you have to do is control for gender (or other theoretical relationships that might cause problems) in the analysis. Unless your theory is underspecified, you should be ok. > Second off, you wouldn't be accurately recreating the way in which people > listen to music - you may end up proving, for example, that spending ten > minutes listening to violent hip-hop in a controlled environment doesn't > make you more prone to being violent, but I'd be dubious about that > conclusion applying to people who listen to violent hip-hop for years and > years in various emotional states. You can setup the environment to match a general listening one. The room doesn't have to be anti-sceptic (for example), but your long term comment is on the money. While in my case I don't think I'd be making any type of long term claim, I do think you could get around this too by specifically recruiting HEADS. Come to think of it, this type of thing could be very interesting. I've always wondered why, for example, I've NEVER seen a fight at a house music set. (Well...I've seen ONE. I was at a house party in Detroit where a couple of japanese women started to fight....but that don't count!) ;) Is it because of predispositions that house heads already have? Is it instead the "soothing nature" of the music itself? > > So if the groups are the same in the hiphop experiment I note above, then > > the only reason the one group prefers violent conflict resolution is > > because there is something about what they were exposed to that CAUSES > > them to. > > But you could well find that some in the group always preferred violent > conflict resolution and did so even before they heard violent hip-hop. > Wouldn't that screw things up a bit? Now ANOTHER way of getting around this is to have a pre and a post-test. So instead of just comparing group A to group B, you are comparing group A at time 1 to group A at time 2. so you can then see whether listening to violent music increases one's own PERSONAL preference for violence as a means of conflict resolution. > Sorry for going so off-topic! But I'm suddenly bizarrely fascinated by the > idea of this experiment :) It IS interesting to think about innit? peace lks
