Monday, April 29, 2024

Setting Up a Factorial Experiment Research Methods in Psychology

experiment factorial design

You can look at the red bars first and see that the red bar for no-shoes is slightly smaller than the red bar for shoes. The green bar for no-shoes is slightly smaller than the green bar for shoes. To find the main effect of the shoes manipulation we want to find the mean height in the no shoes condition, and compare it to the mean height of the shoes condition. To do this, we collapse, or average over the observations in the hat conditions. For example, looking only at the no shoes vs. shoes conditions we see the following averages for each subject.

Book traversal links for Lesson 5: Introduction to Factorial Designs

Additionally, a low and high value are initially listed as -1 and 1, where -1 is the low and 1 is the high value. The low and high levels for each factor can be changed to their actual values in this menu. Although the full factorial provides better resolution and is a more complete analysis, the 1/2 fraction requires half the number of runs as the full factorial design. In lack of time or to get a general idea of the relationships, the 1/2 fraction design is a good choice. Additionally, the number of center points per block, number of replicates for corner points, and number of blocks can be chosen in this menu.

What is a Factorial Experiment?

For information about the "Fold design" and "Add axial points", consult the "Help" menu. To have a total of 3 trials of each, the user should add 2 replicates in this menu. If 4 replicates are added, there will be a total of 5 trials of each. Typically, if the same experimentation will occur for 3 lab periods, 2 replicates will be added.

2.5. Graphing the Results of Factorial Experiments¶

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The interaction suggests that something special happens when people are tired and haven’t eaten in 5 hours. Whereas, in the other conditions, there are only small increases in being hangry. An advantage of these graphs is that they display means in all four conditions of the design. Someone looking at this graph alone would have to guesstimate the main effects.

Magnitude of Effects

After the number of factors is chosen, click on the "Designs..." option to see the following menu. The authors, other than Dr. Loh, have received no direct or indirect funding from, nor do they have a connection with, the tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical or gaming industries or anybody substantially funded by one of these organizations. Dr. Loh conducts research and consults for the pharmaceutical industry on statistical methodology, but the activities are unrelated to smoking or tobacco dependence treatment. Onwards, the minus (−) and plus (+) signs will indicate whether the factor is run at a low or high level, respectively.

This is a very helpful - a good quick and dirty first screen - or assessment of what is going on in the data, and this corresponds exactly with what we found in our earlier screening procedures. This shortcut notation, using the small letters, shows which level for each of our k factors we are at just by its presence or absence. We use "(1)" to denote that both factors are at the low level, "a" for when A is at its high level and B is at its low level, "b" for when B is at its high level and A is at its low level, and "ab" when both A and B factors are at their high level. Another important use of complex correlational research is to explore possible causal relationships among variables. This might seem surprising given that “correlation does not imply causation”. It is true that correlational research cannot unambiguously establish that one variable causes another.

experiment factorial design

These plots are different ways to present the statistical results of the analysis. Examples of these plots can be found in the Minitab Example for Centrifugal Contactor Analysis. The alpha value, which determines the limit of statistical significance, can be chosen in this menu also. A common one to select is "Residuals versus fits" which shows how the variance between the predicted values from the model and the actual values.

Applications of Experimental Design

In order to minimize the number of experiments that you would have to perform, you can utilize factorial design. This will allow you to determine the effects of temperature and pressure while saving money on performing unnecessary experiments. The following Yates algorithm table was constructed using the data from the interaction effects section. Since the main total factorial effect for AB is non-zero, there are interaction effects. This means that it is impossible to correlate the results with either one factor or another; both factors must be taken into account.

Recall that in a between-subjects single factor design, each participant is tested in only one condition. In sum, unless the investigator has access to clearly relevant data (preferably from factorial experiments) s/he should have strong concerns about how the elements in a treatment (the ICs) might interact. Only factorial designs permit efficient screening of multiple ICs or dimensions (e.g., length of treatment), revealing their main effects and interactions and permitting the identification of those that are compatible or most promising (Collins et al., 2016).

Or it could be that people who are lower in SES tend to come from certain ethnic groups that emphasize generosity more than other ethnic groups. The researchers dealt with these potential third variables, however, by measuring them and including them in their statistical analyses. They found that neither religiosity nor ethnicity was correlated with generosity and were therefore able to rule them out as third variables. This does not prove that SES causes greater generosity because there could still be other third variables that the researchers did not measure. But by ruling out some of the most plausible third variables, the researchers made a stronger case for SES as the cause of the greater generosity.

However, some challenges are of particular relevance to factorial designs. A design which manipulates one independent variable between subjects and another within subjects. The columns for AB, AC and BC represent the corresponding two-factor interactions. In the 2 × 3 example above, the degrees of freedom for the two main effects and the interaction — the number of columns for each — are 1, 2 and 2, respectively.

To continue with more examples, let’s consider an imaginary experiment examining what makes people hangry. It’s when you become highly irritated and angry because you are very hungry…hangry. I will propose an experiment to measure conditions that are required to produce hangriness. The pretend experiment will measure hangriness (we ask people how hangry they are on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being most hangry, and 0 being not hangry at all).

Factor analysis does not tell us that people are either extraverted or conscientious or that they like either “reflective and complex” music or “intense and rebellious” music. Instead, factors are constructs that operate independently of each other. So people who are high in extraversion might be high or low in conscientiousness, and people who like reflective and complex music might or might not also like intense and rebellious music. The second point is that factor analysis reveals only the underlying structure of the variables. It is up to researchers to interpret and label the factors and to explain the origin of that particular factor structure. For example, one reason that extraversion and the other Big Five operate as separate factors is that they appear to be controlled by different genes [PDMM08].

In practice, it is unusual for there to be more than three independent variables with more than two or three levels each. Factorial design is an important method to determine the effects of multiple variables on a response. Traditionally, experiments are designed to determine the effect of ONE variable upon ONE response. Fisher showed that there are advantages by combining the study of multiple variables in the same factorial experiment. Factorial design can reduce the number of experiments one has to perform by studying multiple factors simultaneously. Additionally, it can be used to find both main effects (from each independent factor) and interaction effects (when both factors must be used to explain the outcome).

As with simple designs with only one independent variable, factorial designs have the same basic empirical question. Did manipulation of the independent variables cause changes in the dependent variables? However, 2x2 designs have more than one manipulation, so there is more than one way that the dependent variable can change. For instance, relative to some complex interactions, main effects are more easily interpreted (Collins et al., 2014); a factor’s main effects are interpretable even when it interacts with other factors. When effect coding is used, each effect is orthogonal to every other effect in the analysis model (orthogonal when the n’s are equal in each experimental condition, and nearly orthogonal when the n’s differ by a modest amount). Thus, a significant main effect reflects an experimental effect that occurs on average across all other factors in the model even when the relevant factor is involved in significant interactions (Chakraborty et al., 2009).

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