Reference no: EM132378005

Quantitative Research Methods – Assignment

Overview

A pilot experimental study was carried out to validate the manipulation of an important perception: decisionmaker role. Participants were seated in individual cubicles with computers and informed that they would be assisting a well-known, on-campus entrepreneurship research center with a new initiative. Participants put on headphones and watched a video of a professor discussing “a business plan competition for the students by the students,” in which undergraduate students would serve as judges of their peers’ business plans. Participants were then randomly assigned (unbeknownst to them of course) to one of two groups: decision-maker role (experimental) or control.

To manipulate the decision-maker role, participants were told by the professor in the video that their assessments would be the “final word.” Their evaluations of the idea alone would determine whether the student entrepreneurs associated with it would receive an invitation to the student-judged business plan competition.

In the control condition, the professor in the video highlighted that each idea would be rated by a set of students in the laboratory, that the participants’ own ratings would be added to this set of evaluations, and that this collective evaluation would decide if the idea received an invitation to the actual student-judged competition.

To make sure that participants in both conditions took this task seriously, they were told (a) that the center had limited resources for this competition and were only expecting to invite a few proposals back for the final in-person round, (b) they would have to justify their evaluations, and (c) that competition organizers would review these justifications. At the end of this manipulation video, participants were presented with a set of questions that included manipulation checks.

We utilized two separate manipulation checks. First, at the end of the video, participants were asked whether their evaluations alone would matter for whether the idea was invited back, or whether their evaluations would be averaged with other participants’ evaluations to decide the idea’s future (assessed on a binary scale). Second, participants were asked about how responsible and accountable they felt for the decision and its potential outcomes.

To measure this, we used a 6-item, perceived responsibility measure that included items such as “I feel a personal sense of responsibility for the decision to allocate funds to this idea” and “It's up to me to allocate funds to this idea” and a 4-item measure of how accountable they felt for their decision, including items such as, “I felt accountable for my decision to allocate resources to this idea.” Also, to confirm whether participants were engaged in the task, and took their role seriously, we measured the amount of time participants spent justifying their idea ratings.

Data and Variables

All questions used a 7-point scale for all studies, with scale anchors: 1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree.

1. pid: participant ID, a unique number assigned to every participant for tracking purposes

2. group: random group assignment, where 0 = control and 1 = manipulation

3. gender: sex of the participant, where 0 = male and 1 = female

4. age: age of the participants, in whole years

5. eval: whether evaluations alone would matter, where 0 = “their evaluations alone would matter for whether the idea was invited back” and 1 = “whether their evaluations would be averaged with other participants’ evaluations to decide the idea’s future”

6. presp1-presp6: 6 items comprising the “personal responsibility” scale

7. acct1-acct4: 4 items comprising the “accountable” scale

Assignment

1. Describe the complete sample as well as each experimental condition separately. Specifically, provide total counts of subjects, counts and percentages of men and women, and mean and standard deviation of age.

2. Was the randomization process successful in creating comparable groups? Compare the mean age and the proportion of men and women across both groups (in this case, you would want to see a nonsignificant result, indicating that the groups are not significantly different in terms of these two measures).

3. Aggregate the items in each scale into a single total and provide descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations) for each group separately. Create boxplots and histograms (with normal overlays) for both totals in each group and check whether there are any obvious outliers. Finally, run (and interpret) normality tests, as well as Q-Q plots for both totals (within each group separately). [note: this
assumes it would be appropriate to aggregate the individual items into a single scale; for now, assume this is ok, we will come back to this later in the semester].

4. Assume the following three hypotheses were proposed as part of this research. Test each of these separately and provide both SPSS output as well as a write-up of the results, which include the statistics and tests used to support or reject them:

a. H1: There is a difference in mean perceived responsibility between participants in the control and experimental groups.

b. H2: There is a difference in mean perceived accountability between participants in the control and experimental groups.

c. H3: There is a difference in the proportion of participants who stated the evaluations would matter between those in the control and experimental groups.

Reading-

REFRAMING THE DECISION-MAKERS’ DILEMMA: TOWARDS A SOCIAL CONTEXT MODEL OF CREATIVE IDEA RECOGNITION By JENNIFER MUELLER, SHIMUL MELWANI, and JEFFREY LOEWENSTEIN.