Salem has decided to do a correlational study on the relationship between parental smoking and the cognitive performance of their children. How might this research be conducted? What are the major disadvantages of this type of research approach?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In a correlational study, two variables are studies as they exist in the natural world. Because it would be unethical to encourage people to smoke just so that you could determine whether smoking would influence their children's cognitive functioning, this sort of study would assess what is already occurring in terms of the amount of smoking being done around children. The amount of smoking being done around children could be measured by both parental self-reports and the children's levels of cotinine, a valid and reliable indicator of second-hand smoke exposure. The children's cognitive performance could be measured with an age-appropriate problem solving test. The relationship between the two variables would be expressed as a statistic called the correlation coefficient, which has a range of -1.00 to +1.00 . A student should accurately describe how the correlation coefficient is to be interpreted, without making statements about causal relationships between smoking and lung cancer that are unsupported by a correlational design.
The main disadvantage of a correlational study is the inability to determine a cause-effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer.