What issues do you see with their sample of participants (e.g., who they selected, who was left out, how many participants were selected, the process of selection, etc.)

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

Select any 2 of the 4 questions below and provide a thoughtful response in full sentences.

1. What issues do you see with their sample of participants (e.g., who they selected, who was left out, how many participants were selected, the process of selection, etc.)

2. Did the authors operationalize their independent variable and dependent variables (IV and DV)
appropriately? I urge you to think about these comments from the article in particular here, “Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software.” and “For each experiment, two dependent variables were
examined pertaining to emotionality expressed in people’s own status updates: the percentage of all words
produced by a given person that was either positive or negative during the experimental period.”

3. Based on this week’s discussion of research ethics, do you feel that the manipulation of the Facebook
news feed was ethical? Why or why not? Was proper informed consent obtained? Did the potential benefit
of this research outweigh the potential harm?

4. Have a look at Fig.1 – What do you think of the way in which they presented their results? Is this truthful? Is it misleading? Are these statistically significant? Would these results be considered meaningful in daily life?
Hint: Look at the #’s, and at the authors discussion of effect size toward the end of the article.

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