Re: Research Methods in Psychology- What is a good example of a confound in a study?

If you are testing the effects of crowding %26amp; cognitive performance, for instance, you could have one group of people in a crowded room %26amp; one group in an uncrowded room and give cognitive skills tests to the subjects. Differences in results could be due to crowding or due to the fact that one room had windows and the other did not. If you do not account for windows in your measures and results, windows would be a confound.

Re: Research Methods in Psychology- What is a good example of a confound in a study?
For instance, comparing reading skills in boys versus girls. However, say you don't control for socioeconomic status (which is related to reading skills) and boys obtain higher reading scores than the girls. However, the boys also have a higher socioeconomic status then the girls, because of this then, you cannot be sure if boys read better than girls or if the results were due to the socioeconomic effectg.
Reply:A confound is a variable that was unaccounted for in the development of the study. For example, say you want to measure the skill levels of different college basketball players based on what grade they are in, but you don't take into account their different heights. This would be a confound, or a third variable.