Course: Research Methods
Extraneous variables are factors not related to the purpose of a study that may affect its results.
What are Extraneous Variables?
When you’re trying to find out if something causes something else, you need to be careful about extraneous variables. These are variables that you’re not interested in but that might still affect your results. If you’re not careful, they can lead you to make false conclusions. It’s like trying to hear a quiet song when there’s a lot of noise around you – the noise doesn’t have anything to do with the song, but it can still make it hard for you to hear.
Identifying Extraneous Variables
Being a good researcher is a bit like being a detective. You’re trying to find the true relationship between things, and to do that, you have to rule out the influence of extraneous variables. That means you need to identify them and control for them in your study.
Examples
Now let’s consider examples from criminal justice, social work, and political science to help us understand this concept better.
Imagine a study in the field of criminal justice that investigates whether a new rehabilitation program reduces repeat offenses among released prisoners. An extraneous variable might be the prison’s location – a prison in a high-crime area might have more repeat offenders, not because of the program, but because of the environment around the prison.
In social work, suppose we’re studying the impact of a mentoring program on the academic performance of high school students. An extraneous variable could be the socioeconomic status of the student’s families. If students from wealthier families are more likely to do well in school, this could influence the study’s results.
In political science, we might study whether campaign spending affects the outcome of an election. An extraneous variable could be the popularity of the candidates before the campaign spending begins. If a candidate was already popular, they might win the election regardless of how much was spent on their campaign.
Controlling Extraneous Variables
In all these examples, the extraneous variables could lead us to draw incorrect conclusions. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify and control these variables as much as possible. This might involve using statistical techniques or designing the study in a way that minimizes the impact of these variables.
In conclusion, even though these variables can make our research more challenging, they’re also what makes it interesting. After all, if researching were easy, we’d already know everything! So let’s celebrate extraneous variables for what they are – reminders of the fascinating complexity of the world we’re trying to understand.