Alcohol Consumption

In order to evaluate whether alcohol consumption would influence people’s tendency to become socially aggressive, we must have a plausible experiment. An experiment is a research method in which an experimenter manipulates one or more factors, being the independent variables to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process, being the dependent variable. These participants will be exposed to experimental conditions. The experimental condition is defined as the condition of an experiment that introduces participants to the treatment, that is, to one type of the independent variable .

First we must identify the variables of the experiment. Our independent variable would be alcohol consumption. An independent variable is the factor that is manipulated or the variable whose effect is being studied. We will test the effect of alcohol consumption through level changes of alcohol intake of our participants. Our dependent variable would be the social aggressiveness of people who have consumed alcohol. A dependent variable is the factor involving the behavior or mental process that is being measured. The variable may change in response to the manipulations of the independent variable. However, there must be many control conditions in this experiment, without the control condition, the experiment will not know what factors are causing change in the dependent variable. The controlled variable or control condition is defined as the condition of an experiment that contrasts with the experimental condition and serves as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment.

Examples of controlled variables in this experiment would be the participants diets, the time of day the alcohol was consumed, what type of alcohol was consumed, the age of the participant, the aggressive or criminal history of the participants actions, and the overall health of the participant.

Experimental procedures that could help to ensure the validity of the research would be the use of...