What does confounded mean in psychology?
When a statistical analysis fails to find a relationship between two variables, it is usually because the relationship is confounded by other variables. In other words, the relationship between the two variables may not be due to one of them, but instead to something else that you didn’t account for. A classic example is the relationship between smoking and cancer. Most people understand that smoking causes cancer, but when you look at the data, you find that people who smoke have lower rates of cancer than people who
What does confounding mean in physics?
In the context of a physical system, confounding is the process by which multiple variables are related, but not necessarily linearly. For example, temperature may be related to the amount of water vapor in the air, but a rise in temperature will not cause an increase in water vapor – it may cause an evaporation of water from the surface of the earth, and that will increase the water vapor in the air.
What does confound mean in psychology?
Confounding is a statistical term used to describe an issue that affects the validity of a statistical analysis. In other words, confounders are variables that impact the relationship between two variables. For example, a confounder of the relationship between smoking and lung cancer might be the number of years that person has smoked. This variable is not directly related to lung cancer — but it does affect whether or not a person is at an increased risk of developing the disease.
What does confounding mean in social science?
If you want to understand how people make choices, you need to know what influences those choices. The problem is that the people who provide the data about what influences us are not always reliable. People often report what they think the questioner wants to hear, rather than what actually happened. They also report their perceptions of what happened rather than objective reality. These factors can lead to confusion about what really happened.
What is confounding mean in psychology?
Confounding is a statistical phenomenon in which variables affect the results of a study. There are two main types of confounding: unmeasured confounding and measured confounding. Unmeasured confounding refers to situations when a variable is not collected or recorded during the research process. This can make it difficult to determine if the relationship between two variables is actually causal or if the relationship is actually due to an unmeasured confounder.
