Part 1
You are interested in looking beyond a single group and attempt to determine the implication of a group performance on a population of interest. The group can be described both in terms of its makeup—such as males and females, new employees and old employees, and so forth—and the scores in a group that represent some aspect of performance by the members of the group. The terminology used for the above are terms such as independent and dependent variables. Remember that variables have to be clearly definable and measureable. As you respond to the assignment below, take care that you are suggesting choices that meet these criteria. Remember that variables have more than one values or levels. For example, the variable of SEX has both Male and Female.
List an example of a scenario for each of the following sets of variables:
- One independent variable and one dependent variable
- Two independent variables and one dependent variable
Part 2
When looking at the performance of two groups on a given task, one speaks of two kinds of variance (between-groups and within-groups). What does each represent? Be sure to discuss this answer in terms of variance and not research designs.
Part 3
If you looked at a measure of job performance resulting from 2 different manufacturing processes and found that the mean performance of process A was 82.5 and the mean performance of process B was 78.5, why can you not automatically assume that process A will consistently outperform process B? Use what you know about the two kinds of variance from the preceding part to explain your answer to this question.
