Week 2 Discussion — What Is This Study Allowed to Claim? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

"Studies show" may be the most powerful phrase in a headline. This week you learned that every finding comes from a design, that each design can claim only so much, and that the people in a study are owed real protections, so you can now ask what a claim actually earns.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Find a real "studies show" claim about people — from a headline, an ad, an app, a social media post, or a workplace report. Say what design most likely produced it (descriptive, correlational, or experimental), what that design is allowed to conclude, and what third variable could explain the finding. Does the claim's wording go further than its design earns? Rewrite the claim in one honest sentence.

Option B: Milgram (1963) told participants they were giving real shocks; 65% of them (26 of 40) continued to the 450-volt switch, and many showed strong stress. Take a position: can a study that deceives its participants ever be ethical today? If yes, say which protections — informed consent, the right to withdraw, protection from harm, debriefing, confidentiality, IRB review — would have to be in place and why. If no, say what would be lost and how you would study the question instead.

There is no single right answer here. A sleep-app ad, a wellness headline, a hiring report, or a classic study can each be argued well in more than one direction. Pick one you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, quote or describe the claim and name its likely design; for Option B, state your position on deception in one clear sentence.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (operational definition, correlational study, experiment, independent variable, dependent variable, random assignment, random sampling, third-variable problem, informed consent, debriefing, IRB) correctly.
• Give your reason, and name either a third variable (Option A) or the protection you think matters most (Option B).
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: suggest a third variable the poster missed, question whether a study was really an experiment, or raise a protection the poster did not weigh. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A. An app ad says that users who meditate with it "sleep better." The company most likely surveyed its users, so this is a correlational study: nobody was randomly assigned to meditate. People who stick with a meditation app may also keep regular bedtimes, which is a third variable. An honest version: "Among our users, those who meditated more often were associated with better self-reported sleep."

Notice how it names the design from what was done, names a third variable, and rewrites the claim with "associated with." That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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