ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by the post

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office that magical place where time stands still okay here's our question [Woman stood outside a post office]

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which of the following examples demonstrates random assignment and here are

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the potential answers.... alright well before we dive into the

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wonderful world of random assignments and research and experimentation some [Walt Disney stood outside theme park]

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rules need to be understood first the conditions of the experiment need to be

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selected before the random assignment for example dividing groups into

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cucumber eating and carrot eating groups, because that doesn't sound random at

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all once these conditions have been selected we can choose participants from [Participants chosen from groups]

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a large group of people who represent the population and find a way to

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randomly assign them to each group without bias... alright now that we've

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cleared that up let's take a look at our completely insane answer choices

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starting with A.. let's disregard the part where Janine spent four years of her life [Janine inside a post office]

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in a post office and take a look at her selection process.. is at random? Not

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so much as a matter of fact Janine selection process is inherently biased [Janine selects woman from the groups]

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who knows what sort of internalized selection biases were subconsciously

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influencing who she asked to participate yeah we just hope Janine sn't going to

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give her study another shot and spend four more years at the post office.. alright let's check

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in good old Bill next... Bill hasn't actually defined any groups all he's

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doing is asking people to fill out paperwork on their preferences since [Bill with preferences on clipboard]

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he's not randomly assigning anything we can get rid of this option and maybe

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Bill should relax and take in a movie or something..

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well C doesn't cut it either because Anna is simply selecting the first 40

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aardvarks to arrive, seriously she's studying aardvark in cucumber fields [Anna stood in a cucumber field]

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why do we have a feeling Janine, Bill and Anna hang out together anyway waiting

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for the first 40 prevents her selection from being entirely random we can nix

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this answer and hope that our next researcher is a little more normal [Bill, Janine and Anna staring at answer D]

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Jason's experiment isn't what we're looking for either though because it's

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not really random to select a room full of only boys.. that's basically the

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opposite of random it's modnar.. cool word, we should make that a thing

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but we do give Jason points for not standing in a post office for four

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years or studying aardvarjs.. that leaves us with E despite the fact that Jeff has

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spent too much time with Anna and her aardvark he's our right answer he [Jeff with Anna in a field of aardvarks]

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identifies his different groups assigns numbers and then allows the random blind

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selection to determine which aardvark belongs in which group there's no

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possibility for any sort of subconscious selection bias because Jeff himself

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isn't making that decision the randomly selected numbers are way to go Jeff

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maybe stop hanging out with Anna and her friend they don't seem like the best [Anna, Bill and Janine rock climbing]

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