Dr. Tampa conducts a study examining the relationship between exposure to religion in popular media and religiosity (defined as “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”). In his study, he randomly samples a group of 113 participants from his local community college in the United States. He generates a list of movies with religious themes (e.g., Year One, Dogma, Passion of the Christ, The Message) and asks participants to indicate how many they have seen. He then measures religiosity by asking participants how many times they have attended a house of worship (e.g., church, temple, synagogue, mosque) in the past year. He finds that having seen a higher number of religious themed films is positively correlated with religious attendance.

a) In which mode does Dr. Tampa seem to be operating, theory-testing mode and generalization mode? Explain briefly why you get this conclusion by stating the difference between two modes.

b) What are the two aspects of external validity? Pose a question for each aspect of external validity as it relates to Dr. Tampa’s study.

c) A colleague criticizes Dr. Tampa for using a WEIRD sample. Explain what this means and why it is a problem?

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aDr Tampa seems to have a pre set notion that there is a link between exposure to religio... View the full answer